On presenting his new plan for information technology in Norway - "eNorge 2009 – the digital leap", Norwegian Minister of Modernization Morten Andreas Meyer today at a press conference in Oslo declared "Proprietary formats will no longer be acceptable in communication between citizens and government."

Read the full story here

I am always impressed with governments that go opensource. WOOT!

nice article.

titanium_geek

It's good to see governments all over the world are opening up to Open Source and they seem to understand the benefits and the role they play in promoting Open Source. On a low level politicians have to explain where the money is going, on a broader view competition has to be encouraged.

Actually, the reasons are more practical - and noble - than just an ideological bent toward open source. Governments must typically retain communications for extended periods of time. Using an open standard format in these communications provides a reasonable hedge against obsolescence. It is important to them that they still be able to quickly and easily open these files decades into the future.

Yes and no... let me explain. Here in Spain a number of Autonomous Communities have prepared their own linnux distro that's freely distributed and are encouraging schools and local administrations to use their 'product'. They do however not provide any assistance to make this possible. As a result it's cheaper for a lot of institutions to buy prprietory software than to try and figure out how to make the open source stuff go. As a consequence the open source product is regarded by some as a tremendous waste of time and money on the part of the developers (who did so with tax money).

This is a pretty odd report. I fully support govt agencies or govt's adopting OSS, but some of the other aspects of the story were ambiguous at best, and downright Orwellian at the worst, for example Is this replacement ID mandatory, will existing user ID's be disabled, will citizens only be able to access the Net via this new ID? I've got mixed feelings on this

I'm sure that there are many details yet to be worked out, and some may see Orwellian overtones in some of them. But basic problems with technology are apparent now, and they are by no means restricted to Norway.

Document compatibility and retention: When tens of thousands of money_units of public funds are spent in the preparation of a document, one would not expect that the document, in its finished form, would become literally unreadable within the space of four or five years; but it is so. That is not conformant with the law of most countries, for obvious reasons; nor should it be.

Security and authentication: Public and private records have to be secure .. really secure .. and passwords or attempts to physically restrict access to the information are obviously inadequate. (There is a case where a cunning thief simply switched-on the AirPort card of his company's Macintoshes, knowing that the internal network was "wired," and simply beamed the secrets to a receiver hidden nearby.) Once again, we have to have real security, and it has to be based on publicly-available infrastructures. That will clearly involve some kind of physical ("what you possess") token, as well as secret ("what you know") passwords.

Preservation of investment-value in training and equipment: It's one thing for the hardware environment of a computer to change constantly; quite another for the software to do the same. Of the two, software is the more expensive, and it presents a problem like having to learn how to drive a car all over again every two years.

The present popularity of proprietary software also confers upon the software's owners an element of control and market power of which said owners are, of course, keenly aware ... but it also creates a dependency upon them that is not necessarily consistent with the requirements of a government (in any country). There is no opportunity for consensus; no common-ground in which to develop competition or significant choice. When public dollars are being spent in this way, that's a legal problem.

The fundamentally non-proprietary nature of open-source software may be its most important advantage in the near future, because if the "Private Property - Keep Out" signs that are stuck in the ground all over the place are removed, the curious requirements of a government will probably be much better served. Governments, after all, are built around the notion of public ownership, of the infrastructure and of the work product. Such a premise cannot be maintained if the fundamental workings of one's computer-systems are deemed private, and especially so if they are "owned by" a company in another country.

I don't disagree with the rest of what you said; I can't because I don't know anything about it.

It appears, linmix, that you forget that there are plenty of companies that do offer support contracts in linux. Most of these companies offer support for several dozen different linux distros, and some claim support for all linux distros. I agree that there may be cases where Windows is cheaper, but that is only if the companies internal IT department is more familiar with windows, not because of a lack of linux support.

In fact, I've heard at least, that linux support is significantly cheaper than windows support. I would bet on them being more knowledgeable and flexible, too.

Btw, linmix, i like your quote.

I might have been a bit more lengthy and explicit in my reply, but something came up and I had to cut it short. Basically the problem is that public schools are being told: here you are, free to use, so it won't cost you. But they get no help on installing, using, adapting, whatever... It all looks very nice and grand in the news, but when it comes down to the practicalities it's just a lot of wind.

They probably don't get much help on windows but they don't have to install it and plenty of people are competent enough to get started. Most educational sofware install by just putting the CD in the drive so yeah, they must not be impressed with the government linux distros !

... true, plus the hardware support issue. Getting some hardware to work in windows is plug 'n pray, in linux it sometimes means some serious work.

Congradulation to the Norwegian Government.

The user ID definatly sucks!
Society at this moment is so fast changing to a totalitarian orwellian state.

Every day I hear of some new laws about this.

Just see what I read 2 days ago:
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/tra...icle334686.ece

From 2006 Britain will be the first country where every journey by every car will be monitored and saved in a huge database. Camera's everywhere.

If you didn't know yet, London already has camera's and microphones all over the place.



Open source formats are good though. Even as the choice is mere practical.