Following up on my post from last week about the Dutch government adopting ODF, CNN Money has picked up the story as well. (Clearly from the same release, with the same errors!)

Writing “Dutch Government: Open Source Software To Be Adopted By April 2008,” CNN announces, “The Dutch government has set a soft deadline of April 2008 for its agencies to adopt open-source software such as free word processing programs and Internet browsers, a spokesman for the Economic Affairs Ministry said Thursday.”

The motivation is primarily for cost savings and vendor independence:

“The decision directs government organizations to use the Open Document Format, or ODF, to save text files, rather than Microsoft’s Open Office XML (sic, should be “Office Open XML”), and to use Mozilla’s Firefox or other open-source browsers, rather than Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Van Scherrenburg said the government estimates it would save EUR6 million annually on city housing registers alone due to a switch to the ODF standard.”

The phrase you’re thinking of is “tipping point.”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 18th, 2007 at 5:14 pm and is filed under ODF, Open Source, OpenOffice.org. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.