The format war in Denmark

Here is a short summary from your local 'war correspondent'. The war about document formats in Denmark is heavy fire.

Last summer the parliament (Folketinget) agreed on a resolution (B 103) proposing that Denmark should use open standard formats in public governement. This resolution was proposed by the opposition.

In february the The Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation revealed the implementation plan for B 103. This plan consist of several implementations including standard formats for documents. The plan defines open standards quite close to what we normaly do:

...that a standard is open implies that:

- the standard must be fully documented and publicly available,

- the standard must be freely implementable without economic, political or legal constraints on its implementation and use, now or in the future, and

- the standard should be managed and maintained in an open forum via an open process (standardization organization).

But in the implementation plan is given a choice: ODF or Office OpenXML. It is very important to remember that the resolution was proposed by the opposition and that the governement actually don't like it.

The democratical process in Denmark has given everybody the chance to answer to this implementation plan.

Several answers has been given so far:

From

• a group of NGOs (including OpenOffice.org)
• OSL (The Danish Open Source Business Association) known from the famous Ramboell report
• Danish IT-Political Organisation.

The answers given so far is basicly to two things:

1. Why do we need two standards ? One is enough
2. How can Office OpenXML be classified as 'open' when we know that there are several dependencies indicating that the format is NOT an open standard.

The war continues...

References:

Folketinget Resolution B 103 (unofficial english translation) http://itpol.dk/sager/offpol/b103_eng/

Implementation plan (english summary) http://itst.dk/static/nyhed/English%20summary.pdf

Answer from several NGOs (danish) http://www.oooforum.dk/viewtopic.php?t=2622

Answer from OSL (danish) http://www.osl.dk/hoeringssvar_aabne_standarder/

Answer from Danish IT-Political Organisation (danish) http://itpol.dk/sager/nyheder/horingssvar-om-abne-standarder

I'm trying to get English translations of the above answers as well as a complete overview of all given answers. There has been more than fifty answers to the plan.

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I'll put a mark in my diary today

Today I can put a mark in my calendar. It has been a good day.

Why today in particular ?

Because: now I can sync that mark with Google Calendar. Thats why !

Thanks to Dmitri Popov and his article on Linux.com, Syncing magic with GCALDaemon

This has for a long time been a problem to lots of people around the world. And I have tried to find a solution to this problem for more than a year now. And who else than Dmitri could do this ? I have seen a lot of good and inspiring articles from Dmitri over the years. Always very accurate but at the same time not too technical. Keep it up, Dmitri.

Today it took about 30 minutes from I first found the article untill I was able to sync my Lightning calendar with Google Calendar. Tomorrow I will use another 30 minutes or so and sync my local address book too.



I'm looking forward to the next article from Dmitri Popov.

News from the Danish government (on standards)

Last year the Danish parliament adopted the resolution B 103 about implementation of open standards for software in the public sector.

Today the Minister for Science, Technology and Innovation released a report that describes the implementation of the resolution. Here is a summary in english: http://itst.dk/static/nyhed/English%20summary.pdf .

In this report, public authorities mean local and regional administrations, government departments, agencies and directorates.

The report has been received positive today, because it seems that it will actually end up with more implementations soon. The report includes both some very vague parts as well as some very concrete areas with a very fast implementation.

The report includes 7 mandatory areas to implemented or planned implemented on January 1th. 2008. Among the seven mandatory areas is "Standards for exchanging documents between public authorities (Open Document Format and Office OpenXML)"

An open standard is defined as:

"That a standard is open implies that:

* the standard must be fully documented and publicly available,

* the standard must be freely implementable without economic, political or legal constraints on its implementation and use, now or in the future, and

* the standard should be managed and maintained in an open forum via an open process (standardization organization)."

Unfortunately there is no money with the resolution. An overall note is
"...if an economic impact assessment shows that this will not involve
additional costs to the public sector.".

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Compare price of open source versus closed software

Yet another report is telling us that open source software is a good investment:

http://ec.europa.eu/enterprise/ict/policy/doc/2006-11-20-flossimpact.pdf

This time from the European comission

Over the last years we have seen a few of these reports both in Europe and in other parts of the World. The calculations are different from one report tp the other, but bottom line is the same´:

License fee versus consultancy expenses. measured over 3, 5 or perhaps 10 years.



Most companies, organizations and public offices is running one-year-budgets and we assume that the calculations must give some kind of truth. This is the micro economic truth.



From my point of view we need to see things more from a macro economic perspective. A perspective where we try to take into consideration if the society has a positive advantage of the choice.



If we take a close look at the comparison calculation for a short while, we will see that most expenses in the conventional solutions (closed systems) we will see that most of the expenses are license fees. The open source projects on the other side has almost no license fees but a lot of consulting, education and implementation expenses. Consulting work is often done by local IT-consultants.



My point is that from a society point of view the expenses in open source projects has a much higher value. License fees are not local.



The open source projects will create jobs and revenue in the local society and has a much higher value to the society. Projects with closed software will on the other hand send the money away and increase import. Unless ofcouse if you live en Reedmond, California.

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Start OpenOffice.org faster

Have you ever considered wondered why OpenOffice.org is so slow at starting up ?
You actually have several options to reduce the start-up time.

1) Preload OpenOffice.org
You can preload parts of OpenOffice.org together with your computer. This options is only available for some operating systems.

Select Tools Options OpenOffice.org Memory. Check the last field Load OpenOffice.org During System Start-Up. Next time you start your computer you can see a small icon in the system tray.

Be ware that this option takes some memory from your computer before you even start OpenOffice.org. If you have enough memory or if you are using OpenOffice.org most of the time, this option will be a good idea.


2) Load OpenOffice.org with parameter
You can create an icon to load OpenOffice.org without the splash screen. "C:\Programmer\OpenOffice.org 2.1\program\swriter.exe" -nologo . The parameter -nologo will improve startup time.


3) Edit soffice.ini
Find the file C:\Programmer\OpenOffice.org 2.1\program\soffice.ini and open it with a text editor e.g. notepad. Find the line Logo=1 and change it to Logo=0. Then save the file.

It's a good idea to create a backup copy of the file before you make changes to the ini file.

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