Dutch government launches ODF service

Sam Varghese
Thursday, 05 November 2009 04:28

Opinion and Analysis

Leenaars said vendors and customers thus found themselves in a new situation, and with a shared problem: "How do you know if things work, if you don't know where they came from and what it looked when it was made? And even more importantly: what will it look like when it goes somewhere else?"

He said there were two solutions to the problem. "One is that everyone sets up everything locally. But this is incomplete, error-prone and very costly. The logical other solution was to put all these products online and provide a convenient way to access them all at the same time. That way you get a global view of the vendor landscape, plus the added bonus that people can get their development versions out for testing without the software leaving their premises.

"We already have projects like Gnumeric, Abiword and KOffice that have the service into their internal build processes so that their own customers don't have to reinstall software every time they claim to have a patch. And, of course, people also need access to versions that aren't the latest and greatest, because the older versions don't magically disappear from every computer as soon as a new version is published.

Leenaars said collaboration with the OpenDoc Society was logical because the Dutch government had chosen Open Document Format as its file format of preference.

"It fitted in very well with the series of interoperability events that we were already collaborating on, which provides a global platform for vendors - the whole spectre from Microsoft, IBM and Google to upcoming players like EuroOffice, KOffice and Abiword," he said.

Asked why the Dutch and other European governments appeared to much more friendly to open formats than the Americans, Leenaars said issues like long-term preservation, data curation, and also localisation into minority languages were probably more important for European governments.

"Many parliaments took on resolutions for the legacy situation to be resolved. Later this spread, because as soon as you become aware of the many bad consequences of storing your information in an application-dependent format, you start acting," he said.

"Actually, in South America open formats are very important as well. The Brazilian president (Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva) is very aware of the issue, and strongly endorses ODF. And let's not forget that Brazil as a country has more inhabitants than either Europe or the USA. The fact that open formats make the switch to open source software easy, of course, greatly helps.

"Countries don't like losing a lot of jobs and money for the wrong reasons. You want to pay for better productivity, but not for lock-in."

Leenaars said the service would enhanced with all kinds of tools, so that one could see if documents that came in and went out were actually conforming to the specification, if applications kept all the information they found in a document or invisibly lost stuff when they saved it, what documents cause issues and so on.

"And we will  provide services like greeking out documents, so that you can submit a document that crashes an application to the developers without losing confidentiality. The project itself is an open source project, so we hope to be amazed by the contributions from developers," he added.