The Belgian government is the latest country to adopt the ODF after its Council of Ministers adopted a recommendation that would see ODF trialled as the standard for text, spreadsheet and presentation documents.
The ODF Alliance also noted that France’s Direction Generale de la Modernisation de l’Etat, DGME, has specifically referred to the ODF in its draft of the RGI Interoperability Guidelines, recommending its use by public administrations as vendor-neutral, royalty-free format.
Earlier in June the Danish parliament, Folketinget, decided that by January 2008 all digital information exchanged between government agencies and its citizens should be based on open standards, while the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation and the Ministry of Finance will publish documents in the ODF file format from September 2006.
ODF was adopted as an ISO standard in May and was developed from the format initially used in Sun Microsystems Inc’s StarOffice and the open source OpenOffice.org. As such, it has not found favor with Microsoft Corp, which is focusing instead on standardizing its own Office Open XML Formats.
The existence of competing formats has prompted controversy in Massachusetts, where the plan to adopt ODF as a state government standard prompted a Massachusetts Senate Committee hearing, proposed changes to the Massachusetts Information Technology Division’s decision making powers, and the eventual resignation of CIO, Peter Quinn.
