Danes to go the ODF route

Sam Varghese
Monday, 01 February 2010 08:56

Opinion and Analysis

Denmark has announced that it will stop using some Microsoft document formats and move to the open document format (ODF) in April next year.

According to the website politiken.de, it has taken four years of debate for Danish politicians to conclude that all documents which are exchanged between official parliamentary institutions should be in the open document format.

It said the decision had won cross-party support. "My ambition is that in the future we will only communicate using open standards,' Science Minister Helge Sander was quoted as telling parliament.

And the opposition Unity List's Per Clausen was quoted as saying, "We believe that open source is the way forward and should replace the patent attitudes that we currently have."

The move will initially be at the national level with the councils and regions set to follow later. There was no comment on whether the country will look at changing over to the free office suite, OpenOffice.org, which has ODF as its default document format.

The open document format was accepted by the standards body, ISO, as a standard some years before Microsoft came up with OOXML and managed to get it accepted in April 2008.

There have been accusations aplenty that Microsoft resorted to unsavoury methods to get its document format accepted.