SINGAPORE--An official from the United Nations (U.N.) has called for countries in the Asia-Pacific region to embrace the OpenDocument format.
Sunil Abraham, manager of the International Open Source Network (IOSN) at the U.N., told ZDNet Asia that most governments in the region have already stated their support for open standards, through their respective government interoperability frameworks.
He hopes that governments in the region will now extend that support and "seriously consider" the OpenDocument Format (ODF).
Last month, Malaysia became the one of the first Asian countries to propose the use of ODF as a national standard for office documents. Hasannudin Saidin, a member of Sirim, the country's standards development agency, said on his blog last month that the proposal will now undergo approval from a higher-level committee within Sirim.
Public consultation on the proposal will stretch over two months, beginning in September and ending in October 2006, after which comments will be raised to the Malaysian Minister of Science, Technology and Innovation. According to Saidin, ODF is expected to become a Malaysian-defined standard MS 26300, by the year-end.
In the Philippines, there is no official policy on the adoption of ODF in the country, according to Peter Antonio Banzon, division chief of the Philippines' Advanced Science & Technology Institute, although the government agency has already standardized its internal documents on the ODF.
Because the country has a tradition of relying on a "market-driven approach" to adopting standards, a "huge amount of advocacy work" needs to come from the nation's senior policymakers to drive open standards in general, Banzon told ZDNet Asia. Still, he said that a few senior government officials have recognized the value of open standards, and are "quietly doing their share of advocacy to other decision makers [within the government sector]".
According to IOSN's Abraham, the lack of interoperability is stopping more governments from going ahead to mandate the ODF standard within their countries.
As there is "no full compatibility" between Microsoft Office and OpenOffice, the application most commonly used to create ODF files, Abraham said governments might face interoperability issues if they tried to work on Microsoft Office documents in OpenOffice.
International Open Source Network (IOSN) at the United Nations
A spokesperson for Singapore's Infocomm Development Authority told ZDNet Asia: "Many users today use the Microsoft Office suite and cannot read documents stored in ODF. It is therefore not practical for the government to adopt ODF as the only standard, as it will inconvenience a large number of users." "As new formats, such as ODF, achieve more widespread adoption among users, IDA will support them accordingly for the convenience of the public," she added.
The island-state's Ministry of Defense (Mindef), however, has gone ahead on its own to adopt the ODF after it made the decision to roll out OpenOffice in 2004.
According to Mindef CIO Cheok Beng Teck, ODF offers Mindef "true" ownership of its intellectual property. "We now know [how] the XML (extensible markup language) format [is implemented in] our documents, and have the freedom to manipulate it in whatever way we want," he told ZDNet Asia in an e-mail interview. "We are no longer tied down by the proprietary standards of a vendor."
Document preservation
A common argument that supports the adoption of ODF is document preservation. Because there is no guarantee that a software vendor will exist as a viable business decades later, governments may find themselves stuck with file formats that are no longer supported by any vendor or company in the market.
Abraham explained: "Most governments in this region are older than the software vendors that they are talking to, and they will almost certainly outlive the software vendors and developers. For government [document] archives, it is thus critical that [they] use open formats."
For instance, he noted that WordStar was a popular word processor used in the 1980s. But the software is no longer supported by any vendor, and it will be difficult to retrieve information stored in WordStar documents today.
"Data longevity is an important reason for governments to use open standards," Abraham said.
Moreover, governments often make documents publicly available through e-government initiatives. In such cases, Abraham said, governments that adopt proprietary standards are "forcing" citizens to either purchase proprietary software, or use unlicensed software, in order to access these documents.
"The government will become a marketing agent for proprietary software companies," he said. "It's important that citizens be able to consume [government] information without committing a crime. That is only possible if governments follow some form of open standards."
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Gary Edwards
The OpenDocument Foundation, Inc.
Redwood City, CA USA 94063
(650) 365-0899
(650) 888-2268 c.
gary.edwards@OpenDocument.us
OpendocumentFoundation.us
Founding member of the OASIS OpenDocument TC, representing the OpenOffice.org Community
Founding member of the OpenDocument Foundation, Inc. - a USA 501c(3) non profit chartered in the public interest to support, develop and promote the OASIS OpenDocument XML file format.
OpenDocument is the world's first "universal file format". But it's also central to the future of the Open Internet. So the Foundation charter includes another most important objective. The Foundation seeks to increase the participation of open source communities and individuals in the formal "Open Standards" process. By joining OSS with vendors and traditional organizations in the work of perfecting truly Open Standards, the Foundation believes that the Open Internet we enjoy today will remain open for future generations to come.
Posted by Gary Edwards on Wednesday, August 09 2006 04:33 PM