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Friday, July 14, 2006

Who is Next in Line for ODF?

Just for the hell of it, I will offer a guess (based on no inside information) ... the next government to consider making open standards and the OpenDocument Format official policy will be in ...

Italy.

Maybe I am just overly influenced by Italy's victory in the World Cup, but I see a critical mass of support for open technologies slowly building in Italy over the past five years. A few notable facts:

1. 3 of the ODF Alliance's newest members since Google joined were from Italy.

2. Firefox share of the browser market in Italy is now over 20%, one of the highest in the world.

3. The Province of Genoa has made open source software a part of its ICT strategy.

4. Italy's Minister for Innovation and Technologies issued a ministerial order in October 2003 inviting public sector bodies to consider open source alternatives.

4. As far back as 2001, the Italian Government identified open source as a key enabler for building an Information Society in Italy.

OK, I am probably wrong about Italy.

But this I know: there will be a next government that endorses the use of ODF. I don't know where, but there will be another. And it will be really interesting if it happens in a region other than Europe. South Korea? Malaysia?

What do you think?

4 comments:

Sam said...

Jeff-

It's fun to speculate, and I think you're in the general viscinity.

I will bet you a cold saki that the next big news comes not from Italy but either Croatia, Slovenia, Austria or Hungary.

My Asian guess would be S. Korea, but I feel Asia is dark with regard to ODF so am not as confident of what's going on there.

Jeff said...

What I wanted to do was look at ODF Alliance membership list and rank them in order of home country ... and see which countries come out on top.

I started, but it just takes too long.

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