Government Petition for open digital standards

hubris

If you believe that the government should not store and transfer data in proprietary formats that require the use of expensive proprietary software (e.g. Microsoft Office ) that encourages 'vendor-lock-in', and makes it difficult for those of us who don't have access to such software or cannot afford such software to access this data, then...

Please consider signing this petition asking the Government to adopt the Hague Declaration of the Digital Standards Organisation.

The petition is here: http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/digistan/

The Hague declaration is explained here: http://www.digistan.org/hague-declaration:en

If Open standards were universally adopted, it would save us as taxpayers a lot of money. In the context of office file formats, if open file standards were used in schools, universities and hospitals etc ., they could use Openoffice.org or Abiword (among others), which are free, instead of Microsoft Office, and spend this money on other vital things.

Bristol City Council saves over £1million by moving to Open Standards:
http://ec.europa.eu/idabc/en/document/7409/469

C_Ronaldo

Petition signed, im suprised BCC have saved that amount of money

superscaper

Microsoft Office's current standards are open. Even the old formats are readable with open source software such as Open Office. Maybe you could give an actual example where there's been vendor lock in because of a closed format. There's a big difference between arguing for open formats and arguing for freeware software. I really don't see your point as there's nothing really to stop anyone using Open Office with existing office files. I'm not going to sign it because it seems a rather self serving petition by OO and the DSO, which IMHO are just as much about vendor lock in, just under a different guise.

Edit: and just to reiterate, the Bristol example given is again completely misleading. The money saved had absolutely nothing to do with the formats adopted. It was purely on the software they had installed. But whether they had MS Office or Staroffice installed it makes absolutely no difference to what formats are used. They could have quite easily still used the old .doc formats etc with Staroffice. And of course the exact same saving would be achieved but as you can see it's completely independant of the formats adopted. As for the ODF formats, well I'm quite capable of opening, editing and saving in those formats with the current installation of MS Office I have on my PC right at this moment. So again, whether you adopt certain file formats or not is not necessarily the same thing as installing cheaper software or not. Bristol's money saving would have happened whether or not they adopted the ODF formats, merely by using StarOffice.