Norway and Ukraine and FOSS
The Norwegian Minister of Modernization Morten Andreas Meyer at a press conference in Oslo declared “Proprietary formats will no longer be acceptable in communication between citizens and government.”
The Minister, as part of the plan, has charged all government institutions, both at the national and local level, to by the end of 2005 have worked out a recommendation for the use of open source code in the public sector. Further by the end of 2006 every body of the public sector in Norway must have in place a plan for the use of open source code and open standards.
The plan clearly favors Open Source communities and solutions, and Linux, but will also favor Apple Computer where increasingly open source technologies and open standards are finding their way into the historically proprietary Mac OS.
Just a few days earlier, in Ukraine:
“A battle for software supremacy within the public and private sectors of Ukraine has begun. Recently, the Ukrainian Parliament registered a “project of law” (the equivalent of a bill in U.S. terms) that may radically alter the manner in which the Ukrainian government procures software. If adopted, it will require government agencies, along with all state-owned or state-controlled companies, to give preference to open source software.
However, the proposed legislation still offers ample opportunity for competition by legitimate proprietary software. It requires giving preference to an open source product only when the open source feature set is analogous to that of a commercial product, and justifies using proprietary products if the open source counterparts are more expensive.