The European institutions' use of proprietary office applications and proprietary document formats is keeping others in the EU from increasing their use of open source software, according to public administrations in Finland, Germany, Spain and the United Kingdom.

"There still is not the 'big name' weight of some EU institution that would really shake the civil service out of their conservative viewpoint", says Mark Wright, city councillor for the Bristol in the United Kingdom.

The lack of a role-model is a serious problem for municipalities, says Rüdiger Czieschla, head of IT at the German city of Freiburg. "The EU's attitude is not a shining example to lower administrations like us. We are left alone by the EU and by national agencies, and this weakens open source initiatives."

"A clear example from the European Institutions would be very helpful", agrees Juan Conde, head of the open source project in the administration of Spain's autonomous region of Andalusia. "These institutions are regarded as a neutral entity and their IT practice is seen as showing others the way."

A barrier that is keeping public administrations in the EU from switching to vendor-independent applications, is governments (including the EU) using proprietary document formats. Data is often requested in the form of one vendor's proprietary electronic document and spreadsheet applications. This makes it harder for other public administrations to use alternatives.

Enterprise costs

"It's amazing how often documents in [proprietary] formats are required", says councillor Wright. "It is a massive barrier to moving away from proprietary products. The fidelity of document conversion is average at best for simple text documents and usually poor for complex documents."

Wright says this dependency was the biggest problem in Bristol's attempts to use a variant of OpenOffice. Many PCs needed to have the proprietary office suite installed so that they could exchange documents with other organisations. The cost of those ad-hoc licences was around the same as a single enterprise-wide licence of the proprietary suite. "What is needed in this area is for major institutions with the ability and authority to simply declare that all documents must be exchanged and archived in open formats."

This is also the case in Finland. The data-exchange in proprietary formats is one of the reasons that the ministry of Justice is hanging on to a number of licences of the same proprietary office suite, while moving to the open source alternative, OpenOffice. 

All ministries in Finland share the use of a tailored application to prepare documents that are then used in the activities of the European Union. This national application is based on proprietary technology using proprietary macros and file formats, describes Martti Karjalainen, chief system analyst at the ministry, in his Phd Thesis on the Finnish judicial system's move to OpenOffice.

Questionable example

In addition, the Finnish Ministry of Justice shares the use of a special document handling application with all other ministries of the State in order to prepare documents for the cabinet decision system. Also this application is based on proprietary file formats and macros. The proprietary technology has to be supported by all ministries requiring binary interoperability in the integration between organizations. "Like a ripple effect, the use of proprietary technology spreads from the top government level throughout the organisations, mandating the support and costs of proprietary technology."

Karjalainen: "One questionable example is the EC's publication on 16 December on interoperability 'Towards interoperability for European public service'. The only editable version they make available is in a proprietary format. Why not as the standard ODF?"

This  problem exists as well in Freiburg: "As a municipality, we cannot force other organisations to use open standards. If a proprietary document is received, it has to be processed with proprietary products, for there is no alternative, especially if the revision functionality is required. There is no European authority demanding the use of document formats that can by used by multiple applications and we lack a good reference case on a higher governmental level."

In Spain, however, the pressure appears to be less. "Having to convert documents to proprietary formats is not a problem, but it is a bit annoying", says Andalusia's Juan Conde. "It is a burden for the recipient: the lay-out may no be exactly as expected."

Some EC institutions use proprietary formats even in the context of open source. "While helping the EC prepare a visit from a Serbia to our city's IT department, on our use of open source, we had to file several documents in [proprietary] formats", says Eduardo Romero Moreno from the IT department in the Spanish city of Zaragoza.