Joris Van Herzele <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> I wrote them an email politely requesting a copy of the form in an open
> file-format which I can actually read and fill in. I also hinted at my
> federal government's guidelines and recommendations for the use of open
> standards in IT which are actually quite clear,
The various guidelines and recommendations are just that at this
point: advisory only. In most of Europe (and a few elsewheres) there
are efforts underway which could end up with a formal requirement for
the public sector at leat to use vendor neutral file formats, but
AFAIK there are no legally binding rules just yet. That might change
over time after a bit more yelling, but we're not quite there yet.
So in the meantime people like me (and presumably you) end up
grumbling to ourselves and gnashing our teeth while we wait for
something like openoffice to download, install and eventually load
when we need to view or edit the predominant word processing format.
> While I was typing that last email I wondered however : there must be a
> better way to get people (banks, governmental department, ..) to care
> about this ? I don't want to sound like I am telling them how to do
> their job and in all honesty I don't even have anything against
> closed-source software, I only strongly believe in people having the
> choice whether or not to use such software.
For any kind of government dept data, longevity, as in a least a
fighting chance of reading those records over a number of years should
be a factor if they have any sense. As one city IT employee here
reminded me not long ago, the city runs such things as health services
which means the organization will most likely need to keep at least
some data on individual clients around for roughly 100 years (cradle
to grave). The probablility of pulling that off with a largely secret
format is left as an excercise for the reader.
For the bank and other businesses, the stock capitalist style answer
is, "Your web site shows demonstrably wrong numbers to a subset of
current and potential customers. That *may* be a case of misleading
marketing [check the relevant statutes in your jurisdiction], but
unless you start treating that subset of your customers as Valued
Customers and fix your site, I will strongly consider taking my
business elsewhere and recommend my {family,friends,employer,social
club} do the same".
Do stay polite and to the point though.
- P
--
Peter N. M. Hansteen, member of the first RFC 1149 implementation team
http://www.blug.linux.no/rfc1149/ http://www.datadok.no/ http://www.nuug.no/
"Remember to set the evil bit on all malicious network traffic"
delilah spamd[29949]: 85.152.224.147: disconnected after 42673 seconds.
