Via Tim Bray: The people in charge of the infrastructure of the European Union have decided to recommend the OpenOffice.org XML file format for future document storage inside the union:
Because of its specific role in society, the public sector must avoid that a specific product is forced on anyone interacting with it electronically. Conversely, any document format that does not discriminate against market actors and that can be implemented across platforms should be encouraged.
I think it does not really matter that they opted for OpenOffice instead of Microsoft's format, because either format is fine, and Tim expressed this very well:
You should have the right to own your own information. It's your intellectual capital and you worked hard to produce it for your citizens. Sun doesn't own it, Microsoft doesn't own it, you own it, and that means it should be living in a nice, long-lived, non-proprietary data format that isn't anyone's competitive weapon.
Nonetheless OpenOffice will surely gain some momentum in the public and it will be interesting to see, when more institutions start making similar decisions in favour of non-proprietary formats.
Written on 10 Jun 04 03:27 PM.