Let’s all cheer a few times. The Dutch governement has seen the light. Today an action plan was approved by the parliament, which pushes Open Standards and Open Source.

From spring 2008 the central governement will make Open Standards mandatory for their IT. If not possible it has to be explained why it is not possible, including a time line to the standard. Closed standards will have to be phased out. Their will be a commission for people to complain to if the governement uses a closed standard where an open standard can do the trick as well.

Using Open Source is not ‘mandatory’, but when a choice has to be made between closed source software and open source software which behaves equally, than the open source version should be choosen.

MacWorld holds an english copy of Brenno de Winters article puslished on WebWereld which is very informative and probably explains the ideas better than that I can.

The great thing is that there is a large majority of the people in the parliament approving it. It means the lobby of Microsoft against this plan has failed. And did they lobby. I have never ever seen so many protests from Microsoft. They twisted and turned, tried silly arguments, even tried to get emotional at some times. OpenXML is not a standard in the parliaments definition of it, so it is forbidden to use it. Microsoft not happy ;-). ODF will rule. The fact that they have lobbied so hard, makes me realise we are actually making great progress in spreading The Open Religion.

But I don’t care much about Microsoft. They will adapt, just like the Borg from Star Trek. I do care about Open Source and Open Standards, and that’s getting a big push right now and that’s great news!