Denmark and open source software
A story from C|Net notes that the Danish Board of Technology has issued a report that strongly supports a move to open source software.
Proprietary software, according to the report, tends to foster a small group of suppliers or even a monopoly. The report states bluntly that in these situtations
[i]t will only be possible to achieve competition … by taking political decisions that assist new market participants in entering the market.
Government embrace of open source technologies would be exactly this type of political decision.
The C|Net article also notes that the report offers strong criticism of
closed, proprietary standards such as Microsoft’s Word format, arguing they go against the principles of e-government by requiring citizens to use particular software and reinforcing monopolies.
This item is of particular interest to me. At my work (the Division of Administrative Rules), we pride ourselves on being as platform independent as possible. While not completely perfect, our web pages are served using valid HTML 4.01, with a great deal of the presentation provided by CSS. Our online rule-filing system uses pages useable by IE, Mozilla, or Netscape, (probably even Opera, but we haven’t tried). Our goal has always been to provide as much information as possible to as broad a user base as possible. As such, this criticism resonates with me. Why on earth would we (government) want to consciously engage in any action that would depress citizen participation?
