[ILUG] Mary Hanafins progress report, New connections

[James McCarthy]

Actually pollish is just my terrible spelling.

Ask the minister to define exactly what are the open standards & what
the governemt considers open standards?

Are these open standards without known patent licensing concerns?
Will they have any in the foreseable future?

Ask if the future software updates will be support these open
standard?(such as MS Longhorn)


The government is entitled to use what software it likes.
However, it must not make decisions which mandate
that citizens use the same in order to interoperate. 

This absolutely excludes use of closed standard, vendor specific, file
formats such as .doc, .xls, .mdb, .pps

and closed extensions to open standards such as Office 2003's extension
of XML.

If they did insist on this policy MS Office would be a seriously useless
solution.



Ask the minister are these open standards the same as that of the rest
of the EU, are they compatible?


Ask the Minster has she considerd mixing the use of Open Source software
& proprietry software, if an Open Source only solution is too
exspensive?



Ask the Minister to provide the report/documentation as to where the
government 'looked' into the total cost of ownership of Open Source
solutions.


Ask the minister if she would consider the setting up of a permament
commision consisting of individuals skilled in the sector of I.T. to
decide the purchase of all I.T. provisions for the government based on
technical & economic details. 


Mr Bruton, an example of an open starndard would be http, this is used
to access websites on the internet and is totaly accepted & supported.

Another example would be HTML which is defined by the standards body
W3C, as you may know HTML is what most websites re made up from.

Vendor specific open standards have resluted in many conflicts. 
These standards or these vendors extensions to the standards are usually
designed so that they can only be used by that vendors product.

For example MS Word can save documents as HTML files which can be viewed
by a web-browser. however because of extensions to the HTML standard the
document created by word wont look the same or may have errors in a
web-borwser that is not MS Internet Explorer.

Dan Boyle of the Green Party has worked with University of Limerick and
Beaumont Hospital in implementing open source so he may also be someone
to talk to.

Letter to MicroSoft about OpenSource decision by Peruvian Government
(i wont attach the whole thing here)

Have to say input's been really great.