4 Comments

1. Francis Bolduc says:

   October 8, 2010 at 1:07 pm

   Open standards formats but no free and open source software
   Essentially, the proposition is to replace free and open source software with open standard formats.

   With free and open source software, you would automatically get open standards formats. But without the requirements for software, there is no financial gain for the government. They would still pay foreign companies for using their proprietary software.

   I cannot understand why they would want to remove the free and open source software from their proposition.
2. Anon says:

   October 9, 2010 at 12:28 am

   Quebec’s problem is not software or data
   … it’s criss de chialeux de syndicaleux who want to get paid more and work less, all at the expense of taxpayers. I doubt that open standards and open data will solve that.
3. rootdown says:

   October 10, 2010 at 11:59 pm

   In response to Francis Bolduc
   The proposition is not about open source software but open standards and open data. You don’t have to deal with both at the same time as they don’t solve the same problems.

   Mandating open standards and open data tackles problems like data access, interoperability, data migration from a system to another and who ultimately owns and controls the data. Those are the sole problems the proposition tackles.

   OSS would still benefit from the proposal since OSS uses open formats. This fact would give OSS an advantage versus proprietary software when the government goes to tender when buying software. The proposition would then help OSS get traction in government but also would force proprietary software to use open formats even in specialised fields like healthcare where open source software is almost non-existent and non-competitive, and where an OSS-only mandate is not possible.
4. Anon-K says:

   October 12, 2010 at 12:45 pm

   I couldn’t find
   what they considered to be an “open standard”. For instance, is “Office Open XML” (which is an ECMA and ANSI standard developed primarily by Microsoft and requiring a license from Microsoft considered to be an “open standard”?