Germany's Sovereign Digital Stack Mandates ODF: a Landmark Validation of Open Document Standards - TDF Community Blog
blog.documentfoundation.org
The Document Foundation (TDF), the non-profit entity behind LibreOffice, welcomes the inclusion of the Open Document Format (ODF) as a mandated standard format in Germany’s Deutschland-Stack, the federal government’s sovereign digital infrastructure framework for all public administrations. The Stack, published by the German Federal Ministry for Digital and State Modernisation (Bundesministerium für Digitales und Staatsmodernisierung), establishes the technical standards for a shared, interoperable and sovereign digital infrastructure serving all Germany’s public administrations. Under the framework’s “Semantic Technologies and Real-Time Analytics” pillar, ODF and PDF/UA are explicitly named as the two mandated document formats, to the exclusion of proprietary alternatives. “This is not a recommendation or a preference, it is a mandate,” said Florian Effenberger, Executive Director of The Document Foundation. “Germany’s decision to anchor ODF at the heart of its national sovereign stack confirms what we have argued for years: open, vendor-neutral document formats are not a niche concern for some technology specialists and FOSS advocates. They are a fundamental infrastructure for democratic, interoperable and sovereign public administrations.” The Deutschland-Stack is grounded in a set of principles that align with TDF’s long-standing advocacy positions. The framework adopts a “Made in EU first” principle, requires open interfaces and local data storage,
    • Lorem Ipsum dolor sit amet@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1 minute

      DW isn’t the equivalent of the BBC. It’s more of a equivalent to e.g. Radio Free Europe. DW is entirely funded by the German government, in contrast to the BBC or ARD/ZDF which are independently funded. I’m not saying DW is bad, but it isn’t the equivalent of the BBC.

    • k0e3@lemmy.caEnglish
      11 minutes

      Isn’t it odt that LibreOffice uses? I wonder what the difference is.

    • BlackLaZoR@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2 hours

      Yes and they switched form MsOffice to Libre like few years ago for all government agencies

    • MonkderVierte@lemmy.zipEnglish
      4 hours

      More than that, it’s standardization made MS panic and pseudo-standardize their OOXML (.docx & co.) a year later, since some govt wanted to switch to ODF back in 2007, instead of relying on sone proprietary format. The pseudo, because most of the format is proprietary extensions (and only the strict variant, which MS doesn’t set as default), which made the standardization a …unusual process.

      Btw, usually, there’s only one standard format for a specific usecase.

  • ruplicant@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    21 hours

    good!

    Germany’s decision to anchor ODF at the heart of its national sovereign stack confirms what we have argued for years: open, vendor-neutral document formats are not a niche concern for some technology specialists and FOSS advocates. They are a fundamental infrastructure for democratic, interoperable and sovereign public administrations.

    I’m gonna repeat this, as expressed here, to a few people

    • S_H_K@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      20 hours

      As a guy who worked with property recods in US fucking yes. Some states gove the records in a closed format invented by one company. So you have to have their software if you want to work in some states.
      Add it to the pile of illegal shit that is legal I guess…

      • Feathercrown@lemmy.worldEnglish
        13 hours

        I’ve heard building codes can be just as bad, some places the law just says to follow a book and you have to pay some company like $300 to get the book and license things

  • Kapirotto@lemmy.mlEnglish
    19 hours

    It’s so good to see initiatives like these! Hope it spreads across Europe and the World.

      • AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.netEnglish
        20 hours

        Despite being so shit in many different respects (a chronic use of external consultants and contractors means the UK seems less likely than other European countries to make progress on a sovereign tech stack), the UK is pretty good with its data. There’s a surprisingly amount of data that’s released and is in a sensible format.

        During the teachers strikes last year, I ended up using playing around making visualisations using the data about the number of teachers in various parts of the country, and I was pleased to see how much there was there and how clearly it was documented. There are very few things I’m proud of the UK for, so I am glad to have this as one

        • pet the cat, walk the dog@lemmy.worldEnglish
          14 hours

          The UK seemingly got some cool nerds in the government: the gov.uk sites were regarded as the golden standard of design and accessibility in the 2010s, idk about currently. Commercial designers straight up studied gov.uk’s design guidelines to see how a job like that should be done.

          • AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.netEnglish
            14 hours

            Yeah, I knew that, it’s super cool, and it came to mind as I was writing my earlier comment.

            What’s neat about the website stuff is that even if it’s not as good now (idk, I haven’t looked), that value they created is still there in the older case study — there were so many good resources. I was the disability rep in a few student societies, as well as in a few volunteer orgs after uni, and we referenced the guidelines a few times. Good resources like that are especially useful in those contexts — because they helped turn “that would be nice, but we don’t have the resources to implement accessibility in our materials” into “okay, let’s put our money where our mouth is and do our best to make something as accessible as we can”

  • Brkdncr@lemmy.worldEnglish
    21 hours

    Hell yes. I wonder how many man-hours of strategy meetings MS had on their calendars to fend that decision off.