Portugal's prescribed open standards - full list | Hacker News Reader

Portugal's prescribed open standards - full list

computerweekly.com

34 pointsTsiolkovsky24 comments

Ok, so no mention of JSON but we have PDF there. Nice.

Stupid PT government as usual. And as usual, you can be sure the ones deciding on these are the same people that have their own software already supporting this.

Reminds me of the secure protocols that all accounting/tax software had to implement a few years back. The person that design it was the head of one of the largest sellers of accounting software in PT. Ohhhh how open.

Seriously, as usual, fuck them. I'm all for open standards, but mandating this shit is out of line, specially for this country that has already so many problems, this is what they spend their time (2 to 3 years according to the article). Will just mean you will have less SMB entering the market and it being monopolised by the big ones that can afford to do so.

How can a government mandating the use of well known and open file/protocols if you want to do business with them be a bad thing?

I fail to understand your argument, unless you have some economic interest in keeping things the way they were. If that's the case then though luck my friend.

If you spend your energy in doing the absolute best you can to serve you client (the government in this case - yes i know, is not easy), instead of playing the lock-in game then you should be fine.

Hi Pedro

First of all, I can assure you I have no economic interest whatsoever on this. I spent most of my professional life working around Europe and about a year or so ago I decided to leave Portugal for good. I don't use Microsoft technologies and honestly, when I freelance, I avoid working for portuguese companies.

With that out of the way, a few things, first, choosing ODF was nice right? Except no one really knows about it (see comment below where even folks here in HN didn't know that ODF isn't actually a format but a spec for the open ODT or ODS). If people here don't know, you expect your grandma to know when she has to read the instructions to fill some social security form?

And I'm sorry, PDF? Really? Why not Postscript then? And PDF has so many proprietary stuff that other readers can't even use. Heck, in Spain, 1/2 of the PDF forms that you have to fill don't work in Mac's Preview and require you to download the Adobe client.

Second, while I worked in Portugal I witnessed first hand various of these committees deciding which standards/protocol/security to use. Most of them were similar to 'Government asks 2-3 leaders (usually includes Sage and Primavera) in selling software that is related to what they want to implement, they convene, they decide based on what their software already supports or can support, and the government accepts this while they can boost to be the first certified software (since when the law is announced, their software had 6-12 months development time ahead of the competition).

I'm sorry, I would really like to see Portugal stand up and rise to be a developed nation, but the amount of corruption I witnessed and I know from family members that deal with the government, I can't really trust these kind of things.

This is interesting. It has been almost a year since the deadline for the implementation. I have no indication that anything changed at all. Take the following google search experiment

  site:gov.pt filetype:doc (90k results)
  site:gov.pt filetype:docx (451 results)
  site:gov.pt filetype:odf (0 results)

Maybe that's not fair, as the final deadline is actually in July of next year. I guess, as a portuguese, I should know better than to expect things to get done before the very last moment.

Edit: formatting

OpenDocument Format isn't just one format, it's a collection of formats. The one that corresponds to doc and docx is OpenDocument Text:

  site:gov.pt filetype:odt (1330 results)

Edit - For spreadsheets:

  site:gov.pt filetype:xls (2290 results)
  site:gov.pt filetype:xlsx (394 results)
  site:gov.pt filetype:ods (2 results)

Looks like they have a lot more work to do.

Thanks for the clarification. Glad to see it's not so bad afterall.

First, I could not spot a link to anything except that site, so here it goes [1] (official document from government).

I'm late to the party, but essentially what I have to tell - this is just a list of specs. There is no context to that. Let's look at a simple example of SQL?

I think that mentioning SQL as a standard to be supported displays meaninglessness of this document. Which SQL? As far as I know, all of RDBMSes have their deviations from standard. Or they refer to any SQL-like language, not specific standard? How to interpret that? If Oracle expects clients to support PL/SQL, how that would reflect on chosing right client software? If it does not support PL/SQL, but has an excellent support for Microsoft's T-SQL?

Document does not specify where and when to use these standards, as well as it seems too short (just a feeling without getting into that).

For me this initiative is just words. They did not know what they were doing when they began. The did not know what they did in the end. Somebody asked somebody to "do something about this openness". And they did the easiest thing they could - list of open somethings...

Or may be I am missing something?

[1]: http://dre.pt/pdf1sdip/2012/11/21600/0646006465.pdf

As Portuguese it is really nice to see this.

However, given that most small/medium size companies tend to be Microsoft shops, not sure how it would take to move everyone into this direction.

FOSS doesn't matter when you can get someone to burn DVDs for you at the shop around the corner.

That's why some small and not so small companies created their own silos inside government structures, and spent the last decades milking that sweet tax euros.

Now this type of business will end, or at least it will be very obvious who is doing favours to who.

I ran into http://www.esop.pt/ a while ago which "aims to stimulate the market for open source solutions" in portugal. Oracle is one of its members. What exactly is their role? Gate keepers for governmental procurement? Their admission procedure at least seems a bit obscure.

From what i read this appears to be just a group of companies trying to get some leverage. Which is not wrong by any means.

Their member list is composed both by huge companies and small ones, and judging by the areas of expertise of their members, they are trying to offer solutions for pretty much everything a public sector entity needs.

If you know Portuguese, send them a message with questions, comments and criticisms. That's what I did.

If you don't, use Google Translate.

Fully agree.

I don't have any problems with proprietary software, but file formats, communication protocols or any other type of interface should be open.

Looking forward how it will evolve.

If they are going to make things standard, why not settle on the most current open version of each of those specifications? I saw HTML 4.01 in there several times. The only justification I can see is supporting legacy systems. If that is the case, than just specific two versions, one for all new systems and projects, so for HTML, all new projects use HTML5, and any government system that already exists as HTML 4.01, can continue to operate as such. Vendors themselves cannot be grandfathered in and should instead only offer technology to the newest standard.

what?! SQL reference link is to w3schools (http://www.w3schools.com/sql/default.asp) ? That's just crazy.

So what vendor neutral DB interface do you recommend?

Btw, this is an HUGE step forward, and i can only imagine the amount of pressure well known vendors tried to apply..

I thought SQL was at best a description of a family of databases, but that there was no canonical SQL implementation. i.e. MS-SQL, MySQL and Posgres are all SQLs, but they aren't mutually compatible out of the box.

I thing he is referring to the link, not the standard. They just gave up after the first search page at google for sql. They could have pointed to a book or something. w3schools sure gives a bad smell to the thing.

Crazy, but vendor neutral.

Why is my (previous) comment dead? It had some links to the original bill on the Portuguese parliament webpage and the original source for the tables on OP.

What is Portugal doing on the front-page of HN?! :O

I've only been here for a month but this is the second time it happens.

Which was the 1st?

Posted on "November 22, 2012".

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