The title says it, but to snip:
All European institutes should be able to use the Open Document Format (ODF) in exchanges with citizens and national administrations, says Vice-President of the European Commission Maroš Šefčovič, in response to questions by member of the European Parliament Amelia Andersdotter. "There is no lock-in effect whatsoever, and no contradiction with the Commission's strategy on interoperability."
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"Generally, selecting a single, open standard is the best way to achieve interoperability and unrestricted re-use of public documents", says Brunet.
"In our experience, ODF is not always fully supported by the European institutions in their external exchanges. For instance, EC public consultations are sometimes only released and/or answerable in PDF and Microsoft's version of OOXML. In such cases, ODF is supported only upon request and the documents may contain formatting errors. This is a problem for citizens and public administrations that choose to use an open standard for document editing."
Official support
The Swiss Open Systems User Group welcomes the Commission's statement of support for ODF. Matthias Stürmer: "Although Switzerland is not a member state of the EU, we hope that the Swiss government and also the Swiss cantons follow this suggestion to officially support ODF documents."
Stürmer points to the country's highest court, the Federal Court, as an example. The court is using ODF for all of its electronic documents, and has been doing this for more than ten years. "This should help to convince other public administrations to also use ODF."
I find this really affirming. Yes, to be sure, it's policy not fact; yes, it's not stated what the path to enact it will be; yes, it's the case that we've seen versions of this before, even on a transnational level. But this policy declaration comes at a time when the idea of a monopoly on the desktop--Microsoft's and its formats--is increasingly seen as close to irrelevant. That's not because Linux has won the hearts and keyboards of the world (or Europe). Nor is it because Apple's OS X has. It's because the mobile environment is seen as pretty much the future environment. That's not to say that the desktop is about to follow the word processor and typewriter, nor is it to declare that we must all get used to using cramped virtual keyboards on small smudgy screens. But it is to say that the mobile devices that will come in the next few years will be replacing--and also adding elements none of us can really foresee--that 20th century icon, the desktop.
But for this kind of future to work, where documents of whatever sort can be created and shared among mobile and desktop devices, requires open standards. An open standard does not lock the user or buyer into a particular vendor's brand. One can use either open source or not, however one wishes. ("One" including the enterprise class buyer.) It means, too, that municpalities--all polities, really--need to be mindful of the software choices they make. By this, I don't mean to suggest that there should be a disruption of purchasing, which is asking for trouble and intractability. It would also be difficult to plan future purchases and maintenance if the applications and their status were always uncertain. (Let alone ask for reasonable support and training.)
Rather, an emphasis on open standards and applications implementing them to an agreed-upon degree would provide both for application flexibility as well as device interoperability.
But what mobile devices actually support ODF editing today? (I mean natively, not just via HTML5 or equivalent.)
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