In its world tour of governmental standards adoption, ODF makes a stop in the Netherlands.

CIO magazine (UK) writes:

“On Wednesday the Dutch parliament will discuss a plan to mandate use of the Open Document Format (ODF) at government agencies. The proposal is part of a wider plan to increase the sustainability of information and innovation, while lowering costs through the reuse of data.”

“Policy makers see interoperability as the key to achieving these goals and therefore recommend that open standards should be used whenever possible. Bodies that wish to deviate from the open standards policy can request a temporary stay, but have to show a timeline showing a planned implementation date — a policy described as “comply or explain.”

Taking it a step further, the plan also recommends that open source applications be used where possible, to save even more money:

“The proposal recommends the use of open source software if that’s a viable alternative over closed-source applications, which could give a major boost to applications like OpenOffice.”

Europe has certainly become a hotbed of ODF and OpenOffice.org adoption. We should begin to see this reflected in market share statistics over the next several years.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 11th, 2007 at 10:49 am 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.