Norway goes open!

Here's some more good news on the open standards front: Norway mandates open formats. The article is by Arve Bersvendsen, a developer for Opera Software, and points to the original report (in Norwegian).

The bottom line is that in Norway all public information must be in open standard formats. From the article, the mandate requires:

• HTML for all public information on the Web.
• PDF for all documents where layout needs to be preserved.
• ODF for all documents that the recipient is supposed to be able to edit

This is great news, and a great model for other governments. Per the new rules, you can publish in whatever format you like--in addition to the required formats. And content that's already been put up in proprietary formats has to be converted/translated by 2014.

Way to go, Norway!