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Have An Interest in Government Adoption of Open Standards?

By Pamela Jones et al.

I've been contacted by a government agency that is seeking input on the question of what definition of openness it should adopt for that state. Obviously, it's in part about ODF/OOXML. They are interested in up-to-date analyses of the relative openness of the current, approved versions of the two ISO standards (26300 and 29500). They saw the Grokdocs work we did a couple of years ago and were impressed. But what about now? Both standards have been worked on since we did that granular study of OOXML. Their question is: how is each standard doing on the openness scale now?

They would like to hear from FOSS project leaders and small businesses, not just from the large vendors. I think that is very commendable, that the state is aware that FOSS isn't written the way proprietary software is and that the person at home using GPL'd software (or the business, or the non-profit, or the sister state or federal or local government agency, or increasingly the overseas country that is going full-tilt ODF and/or libre software) has every right to access public data -- their own data -- as anybody else, and their needs must be addressed.

So if you have an interest in presenting your views, could you please contact me by email? I'd rather not mention further details here, having lived through the Massachusetts saga.

Full post as published by Groklaw on February 20, 2009 (boomark / email).