2010-05-25
Hancom to lose government office monopoly
This is important news. The crucial paragraph:
"The National Assembly Research Service (NARS), a parliamentary unit that provides policy research and analysis for legislators, now claims that government organizations should be required to use software products that support open standards. The idea is to eventually allow government documents to be created, read and edited by a wider variety of office applications run on any type of computer operating system, NARS said."
But let's continue:
"``It's critical that government documents are preserved and available for access for a long period of time, and it's dangerous for this to solely hang on Hancom's existence as a business,'' said a NARS official.
``The closed nature of HWP also brings inconvenience when collaborating with people in other countries and producing documents. The government has been virtually mandating the use of HWP, and this has hurt market competition as well as technology neutrality.''
"NARS soon plans to release an official report to suggest all electronic government documents, including word processed documents, spreadsheets, charts and presentations, be represented by software designed in open document format (ODF), the global industry standard for open file styles."
Supposedly, according to an Hancom spokesperson, "``ODF is supported on Hancom Office 2010, which was released last year." But I do wonder what "supported" means here; as well, as the article points out,
"It wasn't until last year that Hancom started supporting ODF for its office applications, and much of the software used at government offices are older versions of HWP, making it harder for search engines to detect the content."
Support is not enough; full implementation is required, as is an interoperability path. These are lacking, it seems.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment