
Netherlands parliament makes open standards mandatory - Tsiolkovsky
https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/community/osor/news/nl-parliament-makes-open-standards-mandatory
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adrianN
All software used by and written for the government should be open source,
just like all research paid for with government funds should be open access.

~~~
matt4077
All software used by governments should be whatever is best in terms of
features/price/security/etc. Open Source is nice but not really important.

All data, however, should be in documented, standardized, open formats.

Where it makes sense, software should have APIs using common standards.

Where it's possible without revealing national secrets or personal
information, those APIs should be open to the public,

~~~
rpedroso
Public auditing of voting terminals strikes me as a place where open source of
government-used software matters.

~~~
kirushik
And the problem always is: how are you going to verify that the terminal
you're using is running precisely the version of software you've seen?

There's an awesome online course touching all those topics and then some, from
J. Alex Halderman, Associate Professor in University of Michigan. It's called
'Securing Digital Democracy' and is available on Coursera:
[https://www.coursera.org/learn/digital-
democracy](https://www.coursera.org/learn/digital-democracy)

~~~
noobiemcfoob
Checksum?

~~~
ghkbrew
Performed by whom?

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nxc18
A lot of the interest in mandating open standards, at least a few years ago,
was targeted at the dominance of MS Office. That's interesting nowadays
because:

\- MS Office's default file formats are open standards with open source
libraries/ reference implementations \- MS Office (both desktop and web app)
can handle ODF very well nowadays.

At least for small business and home users, Google docs has become
increasingly dominant with surprisingly little concern for long-term document
accessibility. For example, Google Drive will only sync down _links_ to Google
doc files on desktop. Aside from manually exporting every single document you
have in the preferred format, there is no way to get your documents for
backup/archival purposes, and good luck switching to another service/software.
It would be nice to see a little interest in standards/compatibility for
google docs now that so many businesses use it.

~~~
tremon
_with open source libraries / reference implementations_

Citation needed? FAFAIK the reference implementation is closed source, and
there are no libraries -- only a powershell module that is actually a wrapper
around the Word/Excel OLE objects.

~~~
19870213
There is Apache POI for the JVM.

[https://poi.apache.org/overview.html](https://poi.apache.org/overview.html)

~~~
selckin
Uh no, barely works for even the most basic tasks

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mrweasel
The Danish government mandated that you should be able to use both OOXML and
ODF when communicating with the any branch of the government by 2008. As it
turned out, when January 2008 came around, 20% of the the government offices
didn't know how to deal with ODF files. By 2010 most could open ODF, while
around 7% of the smaller kommuner (counties/cities) still didn't know how to
deal with the open formats.

After that it has just sort of slipped out of the public spotlight. In 2010
nobody really used the ODF format, because ordinary people don't need to send
documents to the government, it's mostly self service online and companies all
use Microsoft Office.

I would very much doubt that the government offices actually use anything but
docx for documents internally. Even if they really should use a simple format
that would be easy to parse in the future.

~~~
mtgx
None of those problems are anywhere close to being insurmountable. You just
need competent people in the government to implement the right policies and
ask for the right things in laws.

Just an example: if the EU as a whole said that by mid-2018, all document
services and tools that work in the EU need to support ODF by default, then
that is what would happen, and this issue would disappear.

The problem is you still have too many people that aren't too interested in
making this happen in the EU, and even fewer people that have the competence
and power to require all the right stuff to make it work. But all of it could
be fixed with enough public pressure and political will.

Your solution seems to be to just throw our hands up in the air, because
there's too little momentum right now to make the necessary changes.

~~~
dhimes
_None of those problems are anywhere close to being insurmountable. You just
need competent people in the government_

What's the word that means the opposite of tautology again?

~~~
matt4077
What's the word that means "uninformed person spewing tired cliches" again?

The EU bureaucracy is actually pretty good regarding open standards. They
publish most documents in html/doc and pdf, see for example [http://eur-
lex.europa.eu/legal-content/FR/TXT/?uri=CELEX:520...](http://eur-
lex.europa.eu/legal-content/FR/TXT/?uri=CELEX:52016PC0595)

They have also adopted the Akoma Ntoso standard internally, meaning all
legislation is crafted in standardized semantic xml (as well transcripts,
court proceedings & decisions etc). The public launch should happen some time
early next year, and it'll allow anybody to do the kind of fun stuff you can
do with a meticulously annotated, machine-readable history of 40 years of
governing.

~~~
dhimes
I seem to have hit a nerve.

~~~
emp_zealoth
It is tiring to hear "goobermint so uncompetent" every single thread on HN

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tremon
Note that this isn't a law (yet). This is a house initiative (motion?) that
requests the current government to:

\- mandate by law the use of open standards

\- publish its knowledge about open source software through normal publication
channels

The second provision is a small step towards creating a knowledge-sharing
platform regarding the use and deployment of open source software in both
government and business. The original motion asked for a dedicated platform,
this amended version allows governments to use already-existing platforms.

I don't expect big changes from this, I suspect that MS Office Open XML would
also be considered an open standard.

~~~
buovjaga
> I don't expect big changes from this, I suspect that MS Office Open XML
> would also be considered an open standard.

[https://www.forumstandaardisatie.nl/lijst-open-
standaarden](https://www.forumstandaardisatie.nl/lijst-open-standaarden)

[https://www.forumstandaardisatie.nl/standaard/odf](https://www.forumstandaardisatie.nl/standaard/odf)

Unable to locate OOXML

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jwildeboer
Originally this was indeed published as a Microsoft DOC file. But now it is a
PDF file, generated in a Linux box. Nice :-)

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EngineerBetter
I expect that this is one of the reasons they're adopting Cloud Foundry:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u18nKAOY5mo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u18nKAOY5mo),
along with the UK, USA, and Australian governments. I think there's a few
others too now.

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cor4office
The law will be into effect in 2017

