Netherlands parliament makes open standards mandatory | Hacker News Reader

Netherlands parliament makes open standards mandatory

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172 pointsTsiolkovsky32 comments

All software used by and written for the government should be open source, just like all research paid for with government funds should be open access.

All software used by governments should be whatever is best in terms of features/price/security/etc. Open Source is nice but not really important.

All data, however, should be in documented, standardized, open formats.

Where it makes sense, software should have APIs using common standards.

Where it's possible without revealing national secrets or personal information, those APIs should be open to the public,

Public auditing of voting terminals strikes me as a place where open source of government-used software matters.

And the problem always is: how are you going to verify that the terminal you're using is running precisely the version of software you've seen?

There's an awesome online course touching all those topics and then some, from J. Alex Halderman, Associate Professor in University of Michigan. It's called 'Securing Digital Democracy' and is available on Coursera: https://www.coursera.org/learn/digital-democracy

That's a good point, and thanks for the recommendation!

Checksum?

Performed by whom?

That's where it matters least because it doesn't solve the problems with electronic voting computers.

The only software that should matter for election is what email client you use to send the ballot's pdf to the printer, and the online store where you buy the pens.

At the very least....all software written by the govt should have the following released:

1) what problem it is trying to solve

2) how it was developed (a git log would probably do)

3) how testing is ensured (code quality)

4) security (if my personal data is hosted by teh govt, I would feel a lot safer to know how it was secured - and BS like "it's encrypted with 256 bit encryption" does not help as does not tell us how it's implemented and policies around it's implementation). And results of the pen tests (along with what was done to improve it must be published)

5) after certain years, it would have to be open sourced (if stuff like National security is an issue, it could be pushed ahead but at one point, it would be considered legacy and retired - which is abandonware - which has to be published)

6) how much was spent on the product (not just govt employee salaries, but how much it cost to host it, test it, etc.)

7) all of the above should be easily accessible.

8) if open sourced, policies on how the public can help/contribute.

It will help guide a lot of policies, bring more accountability and also help push software development.

A lot of the interest in mandating open standards, at least a few years ago, was targeted at the dominance of MS Office. That's interesting nowadays because:

- MS Office's default file formats are open standards with open source libraries/ reference implementations - MS Office (both desktop and web app) can handle ODF very well nowadays.

At least for small business and home users, Google docs has become increasingly dominant with surprisingly little concern for long-term document accessibility. For example, Google Drive will only sync down links to Google doc files on desktop. Aside from manually exporting every single document you have in the preferred format, there is no way to get your documents for backup/archival purposes, and good luck switching to another service/software. It would be nice to see a little interest in standards/compatibility for google docs now that so many businesses use it.

with open source libraries/ reference implementations

Citation needed? FAFAIK the reference implementation is closed source, and there are no libraries -- only a powershell module that is actually a wrapper around the Word/Excel OLE objects.

There is Apache POI for the JVM.

https://poi.apache.org/overview.html

Uh no, barely works for even the most basic tasks

https://github.com/OfficeDev/Open-XML-SDK

I agree with this. Even if MS formats were all proprietary, proprietary formats can generally be hacked/decoded/understood. Closed remote storage services on the other hand, can hold your data hostage, and there's not much you can do about it.

> there is no way to get your documents for backup/archival purposes

https://myaccount.google.com/privacy#takeout

Microsoft can can change that format anytime and break your opensource tools

the point isn't about .docx, it's about .odf, the point of which is that any given vendor can't go change it whenever they want.

I've come to accept that any data not stored as plain text is subject to these format issues.

The reality is we know it's not always terribly important. If you really want to preserve something, you'd use a format like markdown or LaTeX at the outside. Most things are weren't the effort, and I just want it to look pretty.

The Danish government mandated that you should be able to use both OOXML and ODF when communicating with the any branch of the government by 2008. As it turned out, when January 2008 came around, 20% of the the government offices didn't know how to deal with ODF files. By 2010 most could open ODF, while around 7% of the smaller kommuner (counties/cities) still didn't know how to deal with the open formats.

After that it has just sort of slipped out of the public spotlight. In 2010 nobody really used the ODF format, because ordinary people don't need to send documents to the government, it's mostly self service online and companies all use Microsoft Office.

I would very much doubt that the government offices actually use anything but docx for documents internally. Even if they really should use a simple format that would be easy to parse in the future.

None of those problems are anywhere close to being insurmountable. You just need competent people in the government to implement the right policies and ask for the right things in laws.

Just an example: if the EU as a whole said that by mid-2018, all document services and tools that work in the EU need to support ODF by default, then that is what would happen, and this issue would disappear.

The problem is you still have too many people that aren't too interested in making this happen in the EU, and even fewer people that have the competence and power to require all the right stuff to make it work. But all of it could be fixed with enough public pressure and political will.

Your solution seems to be to just throw our hands up in the air, because there's too little momentum right now to make the necessary changes.

None of those problems are anywhere close to being insurmountable. You just need competent people in the government

What's the word that means the opposite of tautology again?

What's the word that means "uninformed person spewing tired cliches" again?

The EU bureaucracy is actually pretty good regarding open standards. They publish most documents in html/doc and pdf, see for example http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/FR/TXT/?uri=CELEX:520...

They have also adopted the Akoma Ntoso standard internally, meaning all legislation is crafted in standardized semantic xml (as well transcripts, court proceedings & decisions etc). The public launch should happen some time early next year, and it'll allow anybody to do the kind of fun stuff you can do with a meticulously annotated, machine-readable history of 40 years of governing.

I seem to have hit a nerve.

It is tiring to hear "goobermint so uncompetent" every single thread on HN

Note that this isn't a law (yet). This is a house initiative (motion?) that requests the current government to:

- mandate by law the use of open standards

- publish its knowledge about open source software through normal publication channels

The second provision is a small step towards creating a knowledge-sharing platform regarding the use and deployment of open source software in both government and business. The original motion asked for a dedicated platform, this amended version allows governments to use already-existing platforms.

I don't expect big changes from this, I suspect that MS Office Open XML would also be considered an open standard.

It's an ISO standard and we remember how it was approved

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Op...

> I don't expect big changes from this, I suspect that MS Office Open XML would also be considered an open standard.

https://www.forumstandaardisatie.nl/lijst-open-standaarden

https://www.forumstandaardisatie.nl/standaard/odf

Unable to locate OOXML

Originally this was indeed published as a Microsoft DOC file. But now it is a PDF file, generated in a Linux box. Nice :-)

I expect that this is one of the reasons they're adopting Cloud Foundry: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u18nKAOY5mo, along with the UK, USA, and Australian governments. I think there's a few others too now.

The law will be into effect in 2017

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