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Great news! Check out this map of ODF adoption in the world [1]. Purple is mandatory standard, green is officially approved. Governments around the world are r

Great news! Check out this map of ODF adoption in the world [1]. Purple is mandatory standard, green is officially approved. Governments around the world are really pushing ODF forward. ... Now just get my uni to move off of docx and I'll be a happy programmer :) [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:OpenDocument_adoption_world_map.svg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:OpenDocument_adoption_worl...

Nux 13y ago
This is great! Thanks for the link. The ODF situation is better than I would've hoped!
hugi 13y ago
I live in Iceland and ODF isn't being used by any government institution that I know of (and I've worker in/for government quite a lot). Is it possible the NATO mandated use of ODF applies only to official NATO documents?
- cmircea 13y ago
  Very likely, the map doesn't say the full story.
- avar 13y ago
  In Iceland in particular (and I'm guessing a lot of countries have the same situation) what'll happen is that the Ministry of Education will publish some official recommendation about what formats should be used, or that free/open source software should be "strongly considered". Then what happens in practice is that everyone just ignores that recommendation and buys proprietary software anyway, feigning compatibility with existing systems, re-training costs etc. So in practice a government recommendation about ODF can mean absolutely nothing unless you really make it mandatory. So this map on Wikipedia is effectively useless as an indicator for "adoption". It's probably actually a map of what governments have made feel-good press releases about ODF.
- freehunter 13y ago
  I live in the US and my government certainly doesn't give me files in ODF. They're either PDF or doc/docx.
twai 13y ago
I live in Italy and never saw any form of official document in ODF. In fact, most of them come in doc/docx where they could just as well used PDFs.

Nux 13y ago

This is great! Thanks for the link. The ODF situation is better than I would've hoped!

hugi 13y ago

I live in Iceland and ODF isn't being used by any government institution that I know of (and I've worker in/for government quite a lot). Is it possible the NATO mandated use of ODF applies only to official NATO documents?

cmircea 13y ago
Very likely, the map doesn't say the full story.
avar 13y ago
In Iceland in particular (and I'm guessing a lot of countries have the same situation) what'll happen is that the Ministry of Education will publish some official recommendation about what formats should be used, or that free/open source software should be "strongly considered". Then what happens in practice is that everyone just ignores that recommendation and buys proprietary software anyway, feigning compatibility with existing systems, re-training costs etc. So in practice a government recommendation about ODF can mean absolutely nothing unless you really make it mandatory. So this map on Wikipedia is effectively useless as an indicator for "adoption". It's probably actually a map of what governments have made feel-good press releases about ODF.
freehunter 13y ago
I live in the US and my government certainly doesn't give me files in ODF. They're either PDF or doc/docx.

twai 13y ago

I live in Italy and never saw any form of official document in ODF. In fact, most of them come in doc/docx where they could just as well used PDFs.