adoption of open standards by european public administrations - the case of document formats
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A few words about
Created in 2002 ;Not-for-profit, industry, advocacy organisation ;We work with companies, civil society,academia, public administrations ;Primary focus : ensure a legislative/politicalenvironment friendly to open source and openstandards.
Why choose open(document) formats ?
1. Accessibility & freedom of choice : ensure everyonecan read and write, using their preferred tool ;
2. Sustainability : guarantee control over time ;3. Fair competition : allow all companies to provide a
service and pick the best one ; avoid vendor lock-in.
In case you've been living under a rock forthe last few years :
A (very brief) historyof document formats
2006 - 2008Hey look atus, we're an
openstandard.
Pfft... we can beopen, too.
OOXML
De facto standard - Microsoft Office binary format
2008-now
New de facto standard - Microsoft OOXML
Look ma, we'reISO standards!
OOXML strict& transitionalStill around : old Microsoft binary formats
ODF is the only standard for offlinedocument editing fully supported bymultiple applications, including FOSS.
Why haven't all publicadministrations
switched to ODF?
CC BY NC SA 2.0 Retrogasm CC BY 2.0 Doug Waldron
It's complicated
Power of inertia ;Up-front costs without any immediate clearbenefits ;Macros and scripts built using Microsoft OOXML ;What do you do with legacy documents?No good support for ODF on mobile.
And now for theREAL challenge
CC BY-SA 3.0 Takeaway
2) "Choice of standards" isno real choice.
See 'To Select or Not? Dealing with Competing Standardsin Public IT Procurement', Dr. Tineke M. Egyedi, 2012