Tag Archives: gov

Norway 2010: Government websites must use open formats

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An interesting story of Norway enforcing public sector websites to use open formats, such as PDF and ODF for documents, in order to lower the bar for accessibility.

Taking effect from 1 January 2010 the content of public sector’s websites will be available in open formats. This new regulation will contribute to enhancing equal accessibility of users and suppliers to the information available on the websites of both central and local government.

This is something that Australia should also be doing.

Malaysian government touts 95% FOSS adoption

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Malaysia started looking into FOSS for government back in 2004. Now, it appears they have reached 95% adoption across the government.

Some 95 percent of Malaysia’s government agencies have adopted open source software (OSS), but the remaining 5 percent have not warmed to the concept–and is unlikely to anytime soon, according to a government official.

United Kingdom government heading for the cloud?

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There are plans afoot to replace the UK government’s computer systems with a “cloud” and free software.

The government will also push for “open source” software to be used more widely among central and local government’s 4m desktop computers. That poses an immediate threat to Microsoft, whose Windows operating system and Office applications suite is at present firmly embedded as the standard on PCs in government..

I doubt that Microsoft would sit idly by and let this happen, though.

Kiwis ahead of us in FOSS?

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First they started beating us in the footy and cricket, but now they’re moving ahead of us in free software too?

Negotiations between the New Zealand Government and Microsoft over subscription costs failed this year, and as a result has given FOSS a bit of a shove in the back.

Now the Open Source Society there is doing something positive – helping the public sector adopt free software by showing how it fulfills their needs. This is a great idea and should be encouraged.

The Public Sector Remix project aims to help public agencies reduce the cost of desktop computing. The project will deploy free open source software for nominated staff to use for common business tasks and evaluate the results.

Go Kiwis, go!