LT: ODF made national standard
Open Document Format (ODF), the ISO approved standard for electronic office documents, was made a Lithuanian standard on July 31. The Lithuanian Standards Board recently published the ODF decision on its website.
"The approval of ODF is a step
towards a safe and open information society", the Lithuanian Open
Source organisation, Atviras kodas Lietuva (AKL) comments in a
statement.
"It helps to guarantee technological neutrality and
ODF will bring economic benefits to the country", say the Open Source
advocates. Having ODF approved for use by the government, makes it
easier for the people to select any of the freely distributable and
Open Source office application suits, such as OpenOffice, AbiWord of
KDE's Koffice. ODF is supported even by many proprietary office
applications such as IBM's Workplace and Google's online text
processing software Writely.
AKL has been lobbying for the
adoption of ODF. "We have emphasised the importance of ODF and other
open formats to many government representatives."
The group
hopes that governmental institutions will now prefer ODF over other
formats. "The most commonly used formats for office documents in
Lithuania are out-dated and non-standard Microsoft formats."
Important alternative
Kristina
Kudriašova, one the members of AKL: "There are not many people in
Lithuania that care about such standards and most users fail to see the
importance of alternatives. Even the Lithuanian Standards Board itself
announced its ODF decision using a Microsoft document."
The
standards board is currently also considering OOXML, Microsoft's
proposal for office documents. A group of Lithuanian IT companies wants
the Standard Board to approve OOXML. AKL is arguing against it and has
raised objections.
© European Communities 2007
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Disclaimer
Further information:
-
Atviras kodas Lietuva (Open Source for Lithuania)
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