Last month I participated in a public consultation about government ICT policy & FLOSS/Open Standards initiated by Internet Society Nederland, Stichting Livre, Media Update Vakpublicaties and Stichting Holland Open. On the 12th of June the results of this consultation were published and handed over to the Secretary of State [1] of the department of Economic Affairs Frank Heemskerk. The report can be downloaded here (pdf).
The reason behind the consultation were twofold. First, the request from the current cabinet to give them input on dire issues in our society and secondly the the unrest on the less than well (understatement!) executed Vendrik motion [2] from November 2002 which states (roughly translated) :
The House of Representatives identifies that software plays a crucial role in a knowledge society, and identifies that the software market offer is highly concentrated and that changing of contractors results in high switching costs.
It is the opinion of the House of Representatives that this limits competition, and society from benefiting of the advantages of software and will therefor request the government:
- To make strenuous efforts in improving this situation
- To make sure that by 2006 all software used in the public sector adheres to open standards
- To actively promote the development and distribution of open source software within the public sector and to formulate ambitious goals towards achieving this
Basically besides the opening of OSOSS – a programme of the ICTU Foundation – not much has been done with this motion (Note: OSOSS claims to be started before motion Vendrik). Therefor a lot of people involved in the free/open source software and open standards were very disappointed with this meager end-result.
In total there were 29 organisations and individuals taking part in the consultation. According to the authors the most important conclusions are (again, roughly translated):
- 86% of the respondents thinks that the government should force government suppliers to adhere to a list of desirable, less desirable and undesirable file formats.
- 90% of the respondents thinks that the Dutch government should participate more actively in the international standardization bodies such as W3c, IETF, OASIS and in the development of relevant open source software. The government should commit itself to reserve a certain percentage of its budget to (follow, develop and stimulate) open source.
- Education should stop teaching ‘tricks’ for certain software applications or solely focus on closed commercial applications.
According to the respondents the highest priority now is choosing open source software and standards everywhere it is possible or necessary, so software suppliers can get back to work. New to develop or to purchase software should adhere to open standards. The use of non-standards should be ‘frozen’ and there must certainly not be given any access to new closed formats. Above all multi-platform should be enforced. If this does not happen than robustness, security, innovative power and economical interests will suffer.
It remains to be seen how the results of this consultation will be reflected (if at all) in Dutch ICT policy. However I sincerely applaud the efforts taken by the authors and their respective organisations in trying to make a difference. It’s now in the hand of the politicians and the only thing we can do is keep this on the agenda.
PS: During the search of background information I stumbled upon the website of the Tweede Kamer (The House of Representatives) of the Dutch government. The two screen-shots here below prove that open standards will have a long way to go in The Netherlands.
notice the windows media stream and the .doc results in the search results screenshots
[1] See the explanation of the Dutch political system regarding Secretary of State at wikipedia
[2] original motion (pdf) from 2002. Thanks to GeenCommentaar, otherwise I could have never found it. It almost seems our government doesn’t want us to participate in the democratic process, because the Parlando system from SDU (the same company who also makes the proprietary voting systems mentioned here) is really annoying in use and lacks a direct linking possibility.
