EU Should Switch To ODF Standard, Says MEP

DTentilhao (3484023) writes "The European institutions should switch to using the Open Document Format (ODF) as their internal default document format, says Member of the European Parliament Indrek Tarand. Speaking at a meeting of the European Parliament's Free Software User Group (Epfsug), last week Wednesday, MEP Tarand said: 'Moving to ODF would allow real innovation, and real procurement.'"

Re:Why switch to that Euro-weenie format?

[Anonymous Coward]

You really haven't been paying attention have you?

OOXML is an outrage and became a "standard" through bribery and corruption - all of which is well documented - and MS Office itself did not actually conform.

Re:Why switch to that Euro-weenie format?

[Sique]

Red Hat has nothing to do with ODF. StarOffice, the venerable predecessor of OpenOffice and LibreOffice back in the day, had their headquarters in Hamburg, Germany. And ODF is the native file format of OpenOffice and LibreOffice. (And even the database engine has german roots: It's the old SAP DB, originally developped by Software AG and then bought by SAP, both being german companies).

Re:It makes too much sense

[TheP4st]

They'll just offer discounted no-roaming plans.

If they do which I doubt it will be a gigantic failure, EU citizens in difference from US citizens tend to travel a lot outside of the borders of their home country as doing so for many often is just a few hours car ride or at the most a 1 hour flight. That combined with many (most?) EU citizens having 3-4 weeks of paid vacation a year is the reason you find many Scandinavians going to the south of Europe for their vacation, Belgians going to the Alps for skiing in the winter and then Italy or France in the summer, Dutch and Germans going to Scandinavia and so on. Nearly every single person I know tend to go to another country several times a year and that is including low income earners. Last year alone I visited 4 EU countries for vacation another for work and 1 non-EU country for a wedding. While that might be a bit more than the average EU citizen it certainly is not something unusual and no-one here even raise an eyebrow if told about it.

With that level of cross-border mobility only the most ignorant PHB would believe such a crippled mobile plan ever having a chance of gaining any traction.