Acronyms Galore: But EIF v2.0 (draft) warrants your attention
Bob Sutor, encourages all Europeans
… who are interested in open standards and interoperability [to] look at, comment, and, if appropriate, express their support for this draft or portions thereof.
What draft is he talking about? This one. It the draft of a report by the EU’s IDABC called the European Interoperability Framework (EIF) v2.0.
They request that
Everyone who sees interoperability as an effective means to provide better pan-European eGovernment services is invited to read the draft document and to provide feedback on its content by sending comments to eifv2@ec.europa.eu by the 22nd of September 2008 at the latest.
IDABC is interested in your reactions and contributions. A summary of reactions will be published on this website and will constitute another input into the EIF elaboration.
The EIF v2.0 will take the form of an official Commission position with the publication of a Communication from the Commission to the Council and to the Parliament by the end of 2008.
Although the draft is quite long (a 3.5Mb PDF) I am going to read it over the next few weeks and will certainly be making comments. I encourage anyone who is interested in Open Standards and the ability to communicate electronically with “the state” using the tools of your choice [e.g. An ODF document, created in OpenOffice.org, running on an Open Source operating system], to do so too.
Thanks for pointing this out Bob. I briefly saw Basil from the OFE yesterday and he mentioned it was due out imminently.
Petition for ODF at the National Archive
Thanks to Russell Ossendryver for pointing this out.
Recently it was announced that National Archives are converting their stock of electronic documents into Microsoft Open XML format. This format is not supported outside of Microsoft’s own products and ties the public to purchasing Microsoft Office should they wish to view the products, which is a cost of around £80-£120 depending on version. It also ties a user to purchasing Microsoft Windows which is a cost of roughly £150 for the Basic edition or purchasing a new PC with Windows which is a cost of at around £200 for a new machine. Instead Open Document Format which is an accepted ISO standard unlike Open XML should be used. Open Document Format is supported on many major platforms and is freely available at no charge. It includes all the necessary features for documents otherwise it would not be the ISO standard. There should not be a £250 charge to use Microsoft for accessing the National Archives electronically especially in light of the companies ongoing litigation with the EU regarding its anti-competitive actions.
Since the recent vote by the ISO, the bit about OOXML not being a standard is now obsolete unless there is a formal complaint made within 2 months. Also, M$ Office can cost a great deal more than £120 if you want any of the (more useful) enterprise features. Of course, Open Source offers them for free.
Nevertheless, although I doubt it will make much difference to the choice of document format used by the UK’s publicly owned National Archive, as it seems to have been infiltrated by Microsoft’s puppets at senior levels, it may well help to raise the profile of ODF and OpenOffice.org to the UK government.
And of course, it’s just fun to be able to make your point somewhere.
http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/ODFinNA/
Norway says yes to Open Standards in IT
Following on from the very recent announcement from the Netherlands, the government of Norway has also stipulated that all public documents MUST be available in open standard file formats. [The English translation below is from Groklaw but not directly linkable]
Everyone should have equal access to public information: Open standards become compulsory within the government
The government has decided that all information on governmental websites should be available in the open formats HTML, PDF or ODF. With this decision the times when public documents where only available in Microsoft’s Word-format is coming to an end.
– Everybody should have equal access to public information. From 2009 the citizens will be able to chose which software to use in order to gain access to public information. The government’s decision will also improve the competition between suppliers of office applications, says IT-minister Heidi Grande Røys. This is the decision of the government:
* HTML should be the primary format for publication of public information on the Internet.
* PDF (1.4 or newer, or PDF/A – ISO 19005-1) is compulsory when you wish to preserve the original layout of a document.
* ODF (ISO/IEC 26300) must be used when publishing documents that are meant to be changed after downloading, eg. forms that are to be filled in by the user. – Norway’s Ministry of Government Administration and Reform
So, now two European (I know Norway is not truly part of the EEC but, like Switzerland, it is in Europe) countries have mandated Open standards for electronic documentation. I wonder how stupid the UK’s National Archive feel now? Or perhaps, because their management are Microsoft puppets, they didn’t really have a say in the first place…
So who really wants M$’ dodgy standard anyway?
Wow! I just came across this interesting statistical site today: www.odf-eag.eu/odf-metrics and there are some real corkers:
Developers & Interested Parties at Aug 07 working with:
MSOOXML: 600
XML/IEC:26300: 2.4 MILLION
Current Developer Projects at Aug 07:
MSOOXML: Not Disclosed
XML/IEC:26300: 254,000 Annually
And take a look at the last table – it shows how many files of particular types have been found on the web: there are scant few in the new MSOOXML (Office 2007) native file format. Seems like it isn’t exactly ~~~taking off~~~ now does it?
