
Dutch government puts more weight behind open standard for office - oever
https://www.forumstandaardisatie.nl/actueel/item/titel/dutch-government-puts-more-weight-behind-open-standard-for-office/
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rbanffy
This is great news (for the Dutch, at least). I am forced to have Windows VMs
in order to properly interact with multiple functions of the Brazilian
government and it's not funny.

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Maarten88
As a Dutch citizen, I'm not too excited. Why should our government spend time
and money promoting a document format that is little used and not very
suitable for document exchange, when conversion between formats is easy and
loosing relevance because of cloud based services.

This is simply aimed at replacing Microsoft Office for Open/Libre Office, and
breaking the Microsoft monopoly. But less than 1% of the national IT budget is
spent on Microsoft licenses, less than what is spent on other closed software
and an order less than what is spent on Services from companies like IBM, who
lobby for these policies to get more government business.

If the Dutch government wants to support open source and open standards, it
should create a policy that requires all its own software projects, outsourced
or not, to be published as open source. That would save much more.

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viraptor
Because not doing this means that the government is saying: "If you want to
interact with our documents on the internet, you need to buy your OS from
Apple or MS and another application from MS."

I'm not sure what you mean by:

> not very suitable for document exchange, when conversion between formats is
> easy and loosing relevance because of cloud based services

It's actually the opposite - conversion between formats is very hard and you
may not even realise when you lose data unless you have the official software
available for comparison.

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chestnut-tree
From the article:

 _" The UK Government Digital Services shared the journey that led them from
user needs to a government-wide policy on the use of ODF, and the extensive
guidance on best practices for ODF usage they published last week."_

Here is the link to that guidance

[https://www.gov.uk/guidance/open-document-format-odf-
guidanc...](https://www.gov.uk/guidance/open-document-format-odf-guidance-for-
uk-government)

