14 DAY TRIAL // According to a press release, Norway has decided to make the government use of ODF (respectively PDF) mandatory. This recommendation was first made by the Minister of Renewal Heidi Grande Roys, on behalf of the Cabinet-appointed Norwegian Standards Council and implies the use of the two formats in all agencies and services. The other formats, such as OOXML, will be used only in a redundant capacity.
Extract from the Norwegian press release:
"The Council recommends that ODF and PDF are adopted as mandatory document standards to be used by all government agencies and services. Other formats may be used however, as long as documents with the same content are available at the same time in ODF or PDF. In remarking that Microsoft is promoting OOXML as a better format to serve their propriety binary formats, the Council states that Norway in its international standardization work ought to promote the convergence of the ODF and OOXML, in order to avoid having two standards covering the same usage."
According to the Minister, the Council's recommendations will be submitted to a public hearing, with opinions to be given before August 20, 2007. The Cabinet will then make a binding decision on the Norwegian Government's document standards. Similar announcements have also been made by countries such as France, Belgium or Finland. The Norwegian minister claims that standard must be mandatory in order to provide a good access to public information and also not to depend on the software or software platform each person decides to use.
An open standard is well known as having a good maintenance from the behalf of a noncommercial organization and also the ongoing development work is based on decision-making processes that are open to all interested parties. The ODF and PDF formats are both ISO/IEC-adopted standards but Microsoft also promotes OOXML and tries to make it one of the ISO/IEC standards. Brian Jones, Microsoft Program Manager reveals an Open OOXML Community site where they expect messages and support from his partners.