Através do site noooxml.org, tomei conhecimento de uma carta aberta enviada pelo holandês Tineke Egyedi aos membros do sector das tecnologias de informação do seu país. Nesta carta, Tineke sugere que devem ser as empresas e não os governos a pagar a arcar com os custos da interoperabilidade dos formatos padrão.

Para não terem que “saltar” de site em site, deixo aqui reproduzida a carta (atenção que ela está em inglês).

Who pays for interoperability in public IT procurement?

A public letter to the IT industry about document format standards

Delft, 16 November 2008

L.S.,

It is not uncommon for governments to voluntarily head for vendor
lock-in[1]. As a citizen, however, I have a direct stake in my
government basing its public procurement of IT on open standards. This
stake may be most evident for ‘civil ICT standards’ (Andy Updegrove),
i.e., for standards that support access to government information and
exchanges with government such as document formats[2] (e.g.,
sustainable digital data). However, I also have a standards-related
stake in IT procured for government-internal processes because, first,
in practice government-internal and –external IT processes cannot be
separated[3]. Second, because of the increasing costs that accompany
vendor-lock-in. Third, because government procurement is good for 16%
of the European IT market and is therefore a means towards a more
competitive and su