Norway could mandate use of open source formats

Norway could mandate use of open source formats

The Ministry of Government Administration and Reform in Norway is likely to take a decision sometime this year to make it mandatory to use the Open Document Format (ODF) and Portable Document Format (PDF).

This shift would lessen the government’s reliability on the proprietary software provided by companies like Microsoft.

Experts believe that it is very likely that a regulation will be passed to enforce this idea. The standards body in the government has studied different file formats for the last six months and have found that the ODF and PDF are the best choice for government documents.

Another European country Belgium has already m has adopted ODF, while France and Denmark are studying the format.

Microsoft fearing loss of revenues from this shift introduced their own XML based open formats in the recently launched MS Office 2007 supporting Office Open XML (OOXML) standard. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) are currently reviewing this standard.