Yesterday, the
Tweede Kamer (Second Chamber) of the Dutch parliament adopted a
plan to switch the country's public sector over to open standards. At the same time, authorities will be called upon to use open source software wherever possible. The 26-page paper from the Dutch Economics Ministry obligates governmental services to provide reasons why they need to continue to use proprietary solutions, such as operating systems or office suites from Microsoft, starting next April; next December, this duty will be imposed upon all public authorities. At the same time, authorities are required to come up with a strategy that includes a timeline for migration to open standards and free software.
By June, the Dutch Standards Institute will be presenting a Basic Interoperability Framework containing admissible open standards. The plan adopted yesterday already stipulates that the Open Document Format (OEF)
specified by the ISO is to be incrementally adopted for the reading, writing, sharing, publishing, and reception of administrative papers. By January of 2009, the Open Document standard is to be implemented wherever possible. The Dutch Parliament's plan only accepts standards for which no license fees have to be paid, such as for patents.
Furthermore, implementation strategies have been worked up for calls for tenders, purchasing, and the use of open source in all ministries by the beginning of 2009 and for other authorities by January of 2010. The project is to be enforced by a complaints committee and a superordinate IT department, which will be providing local assistance in the migration to free software.
