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Don't Send Word Documents to Norway
Norwegian Minister of Modernization Morten Andreas Meyer announced today that “Proprietary formats will no longer be acceptable in communication between citizens and government.” eGovernment sites, including Utah.gov, haven’t been as good about this as they should be. The proposal goes beyond proprietary formats and calls for proposals from the national and local governments to propose plans for using open source solutions wherever possible.
On the identity front, the plan also calls for every citizen to be given a personal electronic identifier to replace the numerous usernames that people have for interfacing with the Norwegian government. We worked on this in Utah for some time, but I don’t think it’s even been rolled out in a public way. We did two crucial infrastructural steps: (1) we created a statewide directory and (2) we passed legislation saying that personalization and other citizen information submitted for use on Utah.gov wasn’t subject to GRAMA (Utah’s version of the Freedom of Information Act) and thus could be kept private.
Posted by windley on June 27, 2005 2:46 PM
Comment from Cid Dennis at June 28, 2005 9:42 AM
People think that because they move to open source that some how they have more standards and ablity to control the software they use. They seem to think that they are getting a better product. I do not think this is always true. In fact I say that more often then not the open source produces have less functionality and less support than a pay for product. In the end the open source product is yet another file format or api set. If you purchase a product from a vendor you get a lot more then just a product you also get the support of the vendor. Also vendors usally make sure that a prior product version works with the next and so on. (No always true in open source).
Don't get me wrong I love open source and am glad it is around. I use open source products every day. However, people need to think a little more about moving to open source just because it is "open".
Comment from Gary at June 28, 2005 10:42 AM
Vendor support isn't all it's cracked up to be. Vendors do, from time to time, go out of business. Even when they don't, support for prior product versions often leaves something to be desired. Word is a great example of this: NeoOffice/J and OpenOffice.org often do a better job of opening documents created with older Word versions than Word 2003 does. That's not just a Word 2003 issue, either: remember the early problems that Word 97 had trying to save documents to be readable by Word 95?
With open source, you at least have the benefit of published source code that is known to work for reading and writing the files!
Comment from Cid Dennis at June 28, 2005 11:10 AM
True vendors do not alway support back word compatablity and do go out of business. But I have used a number of open source tools that just died. While I thought the were useful the developer did not want to continue to develop the sofware so I was left out in the cold. (Yes I did have the code and could have fix it my self. But really not many people do that with the open source they download unless they are really really in a bind because the developer do not want to fix the issue or are gone.).
In any event my point was that open source does not mean standards it just means you get the code. And while that can be helpfully the chances are the person who downloaded the open source tool will not be working with the code anyway so you are still stuck converting to another tool when the open source one dies. However, if you did use some vendors tool and they then went out of business then there is a good chance that some other vendor somewhere will create a tool to help you move from the dead vendor to them so that they can get your business.
Comment from Erling at July 4, 2005 2:18 AM
Just to recap. We're not necessarily talking about open source here. We're talking about open standards.
The difference is quite substantial when you dive into it.