Complaint to EU about Danish approach to open standards

The Danish UNIX User Group (dkuug) has posted a complaint to the EU regarding the Danish approach to open standards. Read the complaint here: http://www.dkuug.dk/keld/complaint.pdf

The key issue is this:

The Danish state represented by ITST has made ECMA 376 mandatory from the 1st of January 2008 for cartain procurements in the Danish state, thus making the procurement unacceptably favouring a specific company and their product, and setting their competitors in the field of office software at a competitive disadvantage.

A key point is this report from Ovitas AS about openness and competition: http://www.itst.dk/arkitektur-og-standarder/Standardisering/Aabnestandarder/baggrundsrapporter/Research_OXML.ODF2.pdf/view

This complaint has raised the debate in the Danish media again, whether OOXML is an open standard or not.

Another mini conference next monday :-)

On monday, June 4th. there is another mini conference at Symbion. This arrangement is about plug-ins and converters. Arranged by DKUUG, SSLUG and KLID together with Microsoft and SUN Microsystems.

Time: Manday June 4th. 2007 14:00-18:00
Place: Symbion, Fruebjergvej 3, 2100 Kbh Ø. (see Map here)

Agenda:
14:00-14:30 Intro about ODF standard
Keld Simonsen, DKUUG, member of ISO SC34

14:30-15:15 Converter filter from SUN for Microsoft office incl. demo
Malte Timmermann, Technical Architect for StarOffice/OpenOffice.org, Sun Hamburg

15:30-15:45 Mirosofts intentions with the ODF standard
Jasper Hedegaard Bojsen, Government Strategy Manager, Microsoft Danmark

15:45-16:00 Pause, coffee and cake

16:00-16:45 ODF converter - implementation and demo
Wolfgang Keber, Senior consultant, Dialogika, Tyskland

16:45-17:15 Testresults ODF converter
Axel Bojer, leader of the Norwegian OpenOffice.org translation group

17:15-17:30 Questions, summary and closing words
Keld Simonsen