Internet-Standard

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!

European politicians seem pretty smart...

Last year, it was French parliament switching to Linux. This year, the French picked Ubuntu as their Linux distro.

And just this week, we discovered that the Italian parliament will migrate to Linux as well. Which distribution? According to the Inquirer, Italian parliament bets house on SuSE Linux.

In both cases, money was a key factor: Linux was determined to cost less, despite startup costs associated with the migration and with training.

Red/Blue vs Windows/Linux?

Open source vs proprietary software is more than a business issue: it's very much a political issue. Politicians who take campaign contributions from every other industry are just as happy to accept money from the software industry as well. Microsoft spends as heavily as any other major corporation.

But politicians also have to use software, the same as businesses and individuals. So which presidential candidates use Windows/IIS for their campaign web servers, and which run Linux/Apache? Check out Douglas Karr's summary of the candidates' OS, webserver and web hosting service choices.