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The use of open standards will be made mandatory for public administrations. A law proposal by MP Astrid Oosenbrug was adopted by the Parliament's lower house yesterday. According to the MP, the open standards requirement will be one of several changes to the country's administrative law, introduced next year. "The minister has earlier agreed to make open standards mandatory", she said. "The parliament is making sure this actually happens."
The first public administration that should improve its use of open standards, is the Parliament's lower house itself, MP Oosenbrug said. "Ironically, lower house published the adopted law on its website by providing a download link to a document in a proprietary format."
A sensible move from a sensible people.
(Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 13 2016, @11:58PM
n/t
(Score: 1) by garrulus on Friday October 14 2016, @12:39AM
"A sensible move from a sensible people."
our people are under under exterior demographic pressure, this has to stop
(Score: 2) by gawdonblue on Friday October 14 2016, @07:29AM
There's only two types of people I can't stand: those who are intolerant of other people's cultures, and ...
Blast, I can't say it any more.
(Score: 1) by DannyB on Friday October 14 2016, @01:44PM
You cannot tolerate intolerant people?
What doesn't kill me makes me weaker for next time.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Nerdfest on Friday October 14 2016, @12:42AM
I really want to push this for the Canadian government. Hard to get traction at the start.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 14 2016, @01:02AM
Easier, perhaps, now that R̶I̶M̶ Blackberry has stopped making phones?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Zz9zZ on Friday October 14 2016, @12:59AM
Forget moving to Canada, Northern Europe seems to be the only area of the world that has their shit together! Jailing bankers, testing UBI, happiest people, and now forcing sane computing! Think I'll start researching what it takes to be accepted...
~Tilting at windmills~
(Score: 3, Touché) by Gaaark on Friday October 14 2016, @01:28AM
~Tilting at windmills~
Watch out for those windmills they have there! :)
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by t-3 on Friday October 14 2016, @09:24AM
Don't go too far north or you have to deal with those long, dark, arctic winters.
(Score: 4, Touché) by deimios on Friday October 14 2016, @03:35AM
Microsoft's OOXML is also an open standard. Too bad that noone, not even Micosoft is using it according to spec.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 14 2016, @08:06AM
...for extremely loose definitions of "open" and "standard".
Its specification reads more like an encrypted inter-office memo [googleusercontent.com] (orig) [wikipedia.org] passed among MICROS~1's code monkeys.
It's only useful if you have the secret decoder ring.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by BananaPhone on Friday October 14 2016, @03:23PM
They can ignore their own standard because:
-Lawmakers don't know / care that MSOffice doesn't follow the ISO-approved OOXML standard
-The membership cost for the temporary ISO members was cheap to do
(Score: 2, Interesting) by pTamok on Friday October 14 2016, @07:41AM
While I applaud (yes, really, I do) the move of the Dutch government to use Open Standards for document exchange, the headline misrepresents this.
It the Dutch government had mandated the use of open standards for everything including firmware/hardware, that would really have put the cat amongst the pigeons. As we know, proprietary 'blobs' abound in anything that uses cpus, and with DRM we know about the associated security risks. It would actually make sense for governments to mandate the use of Open Hardware Standards for government work, but so far no administration appears to have cottoned on to the threat (at least, not publicly).
So while you get control of your documents by use of open document standards, currently, you do not have guaranteed control over how that data is communicated and processed. I wonder how long it will take for that shoe to drop.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 14 2016, @05:41PM
any computing platform funded by tax dollars should at least be able to be run with all open firmware and software. people need to demand it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 14 2016, @07:33PM
While it would be better for open hardware to be the standard, I think we need to recognize that, at this point, that it isn't feasible to edict the government to use them, as there just aren't the options.
What they are doing is handling the problem that they can handle, (data being in free formats) rather than the one they cannot (hardware being open).