Posted on 06/27/2005 12:10:49 PM PDT by N3WBI3
On presenting his new plan for information technology in Norway - "eNorge 2009 – the digital leap", Norwegian Minister of Modernization Morten Andreas Meyer today at a press conference in Oslo declared "Proprietary formats will no longer be acceptable in communication between citizens and government."
Taking great care not to mention the name Microsoft directly, but rather referring to "the spreadsheet almost everyone use" or saying this is the last time I will present a plan for information technology being broadcast on the net in Windows Media, the Minister sent strong signals in the direction of Redmond to open up or become irrelevant to the Norwegian Government.
The Minister, as part of the plan, has charged all government institutions, both at the national and local level, to by the end of 2005 have worked out a recommendation for the use of open source code in the public sector. Further by the end of 2006 every body of the public sector in Norway must have in place a plan for the use of open source code and open standards.
The plan calls for a massive restructuring of Public sector in Norway where digital communication between every citizen and government will become the norm. Part of the plan is to provide every citizen with their own "home page" for communication with government and for opening services 24/7 to the public. In the process every Norwegian citizen will be provided with a personal electronic ID as a replacement for the numerous user-ids and passwords currently used throughout.
The plan clearly favors Open Source communities and solutions, and Linux, but will also favors Apple computer where increasingly open source technologies and open standards are finding their way into the historically proprietary Mac OS. It remains to be seen what response the plan will prompt from Microsoft, who has been very reluctant to open up its word processing, spreadsheet and media formats. Without support for open standard formats, Microsoft will rapidly make itself irrelevant as supplier to both public sector, businesses and private persons, as they all have the need to communicate electronically with the government in the future.
Also institutions and companies like the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK) and TV2 will be greatly affected by the new policies, having based their Internet interactive TV and radio transmissions mainly on Microsoft Media formats.
Of great interest to businesses, the Minister also announced that public information, in the future, should be available free or significantly cheaper than current practice. A move he hoped would pave the way for new businesses taking advantage of this type of information.
They do NOT have to cater to some ultra-hardcore Linux dork (with a kernel compiled from Assembly) who deliberately shuns all GUIs and only has a 1983-vintage Brother® daisy-wheel printer to output the document on.
The end user is the one being unreasonable.
Strawberries is okay with me.
Try this: http://www.aftenposten.no/english/local/article942519.ece
Who said anything about Linux? I dont care if they are running Linux, OSX, Apple, BeOS, .... This is about the information being open to all people in the nation without regards to who they buy their software from! Hell if they go to an open format and MS supports it *GREAT*..
The end user is the one being unreasonable.
How about linspire? something an enduser might buy now, that MS does not make an office suite for? Why should I have to buy a product from a particular company to know whats going on in my government, when open formats that can be read on any platform are available?
He proposes that private enterprise expend time, effort, and money to develop another format and refine it so that it is comparable with .pdf.
After doing so, they should then take the next and obvious step of making zero money in return for this work by making it an 'open' or non-proprietary format, so that anyone can write readers and writers to the format and forgo paying the developing company any money.
This the private company will do, to the detriment of its employees and its stockholders, and the amusement of any competitors it might have, because the Norwegian official Said So. If they fail to do this, they will be forced to chop down the tallest tree in the forest with ....
a herring! (dramatic clash of music)
No, I do believe that part of your petitioning for 'open source' will come to mean that documents from the government can be read on anything you choose and be likewise manipulated on anything you choose and ultimately compel the government to accept it as their own legal document.
If you demand something other than .PDF so that your Hewlett-Packard palmtop can open an application for a driver's license and print it on scrolly thermal ribbon paper, don't be surprised when the DMV says 'omgwtflolz' and rejects it.
The digital revolution is about embracing standards, not non-standards.
No I dont
After doing so, they should then take the next and obvious step of making zero money in return for this work by making it an 'open' or non-proprietary format
No I dont
please dont presume to spek for me, youre not doing a very good job of it..
.txt is pretty portable. .html works just fine with browsers from Lynx to IE.
Oh, but they wanted *fancy* formats. Ah.
I took it to read that he means Adobe must create Acrobat Reader for his PDP-1 with the oscilloscope screen so that he can read Norwegian farm reports that he gets in the mail on punch-cards.
... that is, if Adobe wants to do business in Norway.
Not you, this Norwegian minister.
Funny I did not know the English language was privately owned, and a secret at that...
I do believe that part of your petitioning for 'open source' will come to mean that documents from the government can be read on anything you choose and be likewise manipulated on anything you choose and ultimately compel the government to accept it as their own legal document.
Certainly not by my endorsement, private people can store and move their data anyway they want.
The digital revolution is about embracing standards, not non-standards.
Standards which are locked up by a company that can drop them at any time are not standards. when a company can drop support in their next version forcing a huge data conversion so that people can keep accessing government data until the next time the standard is changed what is that? http is a standard, ftp is a standard (albeit not a great one), ssh is a standard, png is a standard... Being open and being standard have nothing to do with eachother.
Oh yeah, me too. That's who I meant. The Norwegian minister.
Isn't the PDF spec freely available?
could be, I know I have seen readers out there, but then again openoffice can read word docs. If the pdfspec is open (just like if the spec for .doc was open) I would have no problem with anyone using it...
I'd bet he's out there too, that's why the news article got posted?
"On presenting his new plan for information technology in Norway - "eNorge 2009 – the digital leap", Norwegian Minister of Modernization Morten Andreas Meyer today at a press conference in Oslo declared "Proprietary formats will no longer be acceptable in communication between citizens and government.""
I don't see this as an open source bit at all, just another socialist government trying to use a buzzword to 'demand' things out of private companies.
Ghostscript is just reader software that interprets postscript files. It's not a format. But yes your general statement about pdf is correct. It's the defacto standard.
I used to work for the government and we did require certain formats from companies (at the time it was word) who delt with us, how is this different?
Oh, but they wanted *fancy* formats. Ah."
Right. They want a full free featureset, presumably to have an identical copy of the original. It's exactly the point I made that the original posted skipped over without comment: 'Open Source' people don't want just the .TXT version, they want to have the answer in hand and let someone else solve the puzzle.
Ridiculous.
BUMP
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