Dutch government puts more weight behind open standard for office

As a Dutch citizen, I'm not too excited. Why should our government spend time and money promoting a document format that is little used and not very suitable for document exchange, when conversion between formats is easy and loosing relevance because of cloud based services.

This is simply aimed at replacing Microsoft Office for Open/Libre Office, and breaking the Microsoft monopoly. But less than 1% of the national IT budget is spent on Microsoft licenses, less than what is spent on other closed software and an order less than what is spent on Services from companies like IBM, who lobby for these policies to get more government business.

If the Dutch government wants to support open source and open standards, it should create a policy that requires all its own software projects, outsourced or not, to be published as open source. That would save much more.