Norway mandates government use of ODF

20 Dec 2007 | 18:36 GMT

By Egan Orion

NORWAY'S GOVERNMENT has mandated that its websites must use Open Document Format (ODF) for files published for use by the Norwegian public.

A reader of Groklaw kindly translated the Norwegian government's press release for publication on Groklaw's News Picks sidebar. Since that's not a persistently linkable Groklaw article, we republish the English translation below as a public service:

"Everyone should have equal access to public information: Open standards become compulsory within the government.

"The government has decided that all information on governmental websites should be available in the open formats HTML, PDF or ODF. With this decision the times when public documents where only available in Microsoft's Word-format is coming to an end.

"'Everybody should have equal access to public information. From 2009 the citizens will be able to chose which software to use in order to gain access to public information. The government's decision will also improve the competition between suppliers of office applications,' says IT-minister Heidi Grande Røys.

"This is the decision of the government:

"* HTML should be the primary format for publication of public information on the Internet.

"* PDF (1.4 or newer, or PDF/A - ISO 19005-1) is compulsory when you wish to preserve the original layout of a document.

"* ODF (ISO/IEC 26300) must be used when publishing documents that are meant to be changed after downloading, eg. forms that are to be filled in by the user.

"- Norway's Ministry of Government Administration and Reform"
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L'INQ
Norwegian Government Press Release (in Norwegian)

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