Dutch Government Adopts Open Source Software Initiative 118
christian.einfeldt writes "The Dutch government has set a target date of April 2008 for its agencies to start preferentially using open standards-based software. Organizations in the government will still be able to use proprietary software and formats ... but will have to justify it. A Microsoft Netherlands spokesman claims that Microsoft's Office productivity suite will still be used widely in the Dutch government until April, and that Microsoft Office will comply with the new Dutch rules once Microsoft's so-called "Open Office XML" standard is approved as an international ISO standard in February."
Erm? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Erm? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:mmmm (Score:5, Informative)
The Socialist Party wants the cost of a PC split in a software part and a hardware part. This concept of course is the way to go, but I don't see this happen soon.
Microsoft should not worry at all, since the users in the government use the plug-in at some departments already. I didn't hear anyone mentioning OpenOffice.
Re:I love it - the name OOXML is a misnomer (Score:5, Informative)
The only saving grace would be for the BRM to reject this from becoming an ISO standard in February. Else Microsoft's efforts to confuse the market with their skewed terminology looks set to continue.
Re:I love it (Score:1, Informative)
Re:mmmm (Score:2, Informative)
Fixing the faulty ISO process should be next on the list for the Dutch government
Bad Article (Score:2, Informative)
I talked about this with a friend yesterday, and we noticed that this was a very badly written article that gets basically everything wrong. But that's tech journalism for ya.
Here are some relevant links from his blog [wordpress.com]:
Interesting tag (Score:2, Informative)