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.
n3wbi3 also said but its not causal.. More chicoms than americans eat millet, that does not make millet communist..
There are already open standards that were developed by the OSS community, they dont need companies to do it for them they have done just fine on their own.
The spec for .DOC is not open. It has been reverse engineered with much trial, error, and gnashing of teeth. That's why there are so many formatting issues with .doc files in OpenOffice if they have any complexity to speak of. Most of the time, it does a pretty good job, but you can get some serious weirdness if someone uses footnotes, endnotes, versioning and other similar stuff. Quite frankly, it's amazing it does as good as it does, but it's not perfect (yet).
The OpenOffice format OTOH, is completely open in all respects. Apparenly the AbiWord and OpenOffice folks have gotten together over some stuff, and the upcoming versions of both word processors use the exact same file format. One thing I like about OO's file format is that it is Zipped and the actual formatting information is separate from the content. I've seen some neat stuff done with batchfiles manipulating .sxw files to do search/replace and formatting changes for mass edits on the fly.
That is a useful feature IMO. Let us say you work for for ABC Widget Co., who just had a merger with Bongo's Knicknacs Inc. You have about 100 documents that you need to change to reflect this change. A little knowlege of the format would allow you to create a very simple shell script that could be executed once in any directory containing the OO files you want to change that pretty much does a global search/replace, and poof you are done.
Granted, your average secretary probably couldn't write the script, but someone else could write it and distribute it to anyone who needs it.
And a cvs diff is useful..
Oh No! My bird is communist! Guess I'll have to kill him now.
Great point. Imagine that, versioning independent of the data...
If you eat millit that means youre helping the chicoms in their attempt to take over the world..
"'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."
Again I don't think it's "Open Source people" but just another socialist government bureaucrat using a convenient buzzword in pursuit of the usual goal of "you do the work and I'll reap the benefit."
It's kind of like when a clueless manager starts tossing around talk about 'paradigm' and 'forward looking' and so forth; instantly you can tell the real meaning is "I will work you like dogs and give you no credit as I plan my next career move." :)
If someone is a socialist theyll use whatever they can to expand the power of government, if someone is a conservative they will use whatever they can to reduce it. OpenSource software (like any other tool) can be used to do either..
If you want to hear a Danish girl pronouncing that, click here and then on the little box with "Rødgrød med fløde" in blue letters.
IIRC the Danes like to sing a parody of the British national anthem by substituting Rødgrød med fløde for "God save our gracious Queen."
"Remember--if you eat millet, you're eating COMMUNISM!"
ummm is it still ok to drink it ;)
But there is that "correlation" between open source and socialist governments that you yourself admitted above. It's no accident they are all passing laws requiring open source, it fits perfectly into their long term model. As long as you continue to admit the correlation, you'll get less and less complaint out of me.
I know plenty of Danish girls. Some of them wrote me letters for years after I was there....:)
Determining the nature of causation is very difficult. Sometimes a cause and effect are closely related - spatially, temporally or both - but sometimes they are not. However, humans seem to be inclined to assume that events which are closely connected either spatially or temporally are also connected causally.
Moer specifically Cum hoc ergo propter hoc
Is that English? Doesn't look like it to me.
Well we have one hell of a consistent pattern, though don't we.
As I said 99% of millit eathers are chicoms, that says nothing about millit...
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