Norway's governement switching to open standards

[Rick]

Norwegian Minister: Proprietary Formats No Longer Acceptable in Communication with Government

How nice...

[@$3.1415rin]

the scandinavian countries are often quite a bit in advance in a lot of topics, like school systems, social systems, etc. pp. and 20 years later for example germany changes the same things in a similar way

[botmeister]

Finally some excellent news in this area which includes everything from censoring the internet, to preventing people from creating programs through crazy patent legislation. Thanks for the post.

We need more governments to jump on the bandwagon because open source standards and software cannot be as easily controled as closed and patented systems.

[Pierre-Marie Baty]

There was a similar project to switch all the administration to Linux over here, but I believe lobby pressures killed it. Nice news anyway.

[Whistler]

well that is nice, but here is not as nice as that

the Chinese government not only requires submitting files to them in Microsoft format, but also make proprietary programs themselves and force any companies to use them - and some are network programs whose protocal is of course secret

[botmeister]

It's a battle between MS Windows and Open Source Linux.

Microsoft helps China to censor bloggers

Article about Linux in India and China.
Open IT: Govt to rewrite source code in Linux

Microsoft, in what many observers and reports say is an attempt to soften the Chinese government's stand, recently committed to investing $750m in China in three years to help set up a software college and put its money into Chinese education.
In comparison, Microsoft has announced investments worth only $75m over a three-year time frame in India. Howver, the Chinese company Redflag Software, which was set up by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the country's most prestigious research institute, has often come out with low-cost software based on Linux, in direct competition to Windows-based software.

[Whistler]

having said that, that "Redflag software" company has contributed very little to the free software community. Their GNU/Linux distribution is full of proprietary packages (it's 3 binary CDs plus only 1 source CDs, while Debian is 14 binary CDs plus 15 source CDs), and they have also a cheap ripoff of OpenOffice.org with some minor improvements named "RedOffice" (saying it's a ripoff is not wrong as they do claim that they have all the "intellectual property rights" in that "product", which is not even allowed by the BSD License, not to say LGPL and Sun Industry Standard License either). However they do threaten Microsoft's monopoly.

And I don't think our government is willing to promote free software in the common people (maybe they will use Redflag "Linux" and RedOffice in the office for cost and "security" reasons anyway). I had a part-time job in a local company in Lanzhou to deal with their computers and I know that they are required to use 2 proprietary software packages from the government (which are all only available in Windows versions). And I think what's said in that article really means "to support proprietary software which runs in GNU/Linux", rather than generally "to support free software".

[Zacker]

Sounds great with the use of open source in Norway! Currently in DK it is also pretty exciting as we are restructuring the regions, states or whatever it is called. So there is happen a lot of switching from some software to some other these years. Until now I have heard both that some go to M$ while others go to OS.

[TruB]

go to os?.. open source or operating system?

[Zacker]

Open Source