Hi Pedro First of all, I can assure you I have no economic interest whatsoever on this. I spent most of my professional life working around Europe and about a

Hi Pedro First of all, I can assure you I have no economic interest whatsoever on this. I spent most of my professional life working around Europe and about a year or so ago I decided to leave Portugal for good. I don't use Microsoft technologies and honestly, when I freelance, I avoid working for portuguese companies. With that out of the way, a few things, first, choosing ODF was nice right? Except no one really knows about it (see comment below where even folks here in HN didn't know that ODF isn't actually a format but a spec for the open ODT or ODS). If people here don't know, you expect your grandma to know when she has to read the instructions to fill some social security form? And I'm sorry, PDF? Really? Why not Postscript then? And PDF has so many proprietary stuff that other readers can't even use. Heck, in Spain, 1/2 of the PDF forms that you have to fill don't work in Mac's Preview and require you to download the Adobe client. Second, while I worked in Portugal I witnessed first hand various of these committees deciding which standards/protocol/security to use. Most of them were similar to 'Government asks 2-3 leaders (usually includes Sage and Primavera) in selling software that is related to what they want to implement, they convene, they decide based on what their software already supports or can support, and the government accepts this while they can boost to be the first certified software (since when the law is announced, their software had 6-12 months development time ahead of the competition). I'm sorry, I would really like to see Portugal stand up and rise to be a developed nation, but the amount of corruption I witnessed and I know from family members that deal with the government, I can't really trust these kind of things.