The Portuguese Parliament last week unanimously decided to make all its documents available in open electronic formats. A second proposal, requesting a migration to an Open Source IT infrastructure, was scrapped.

The resolution, drafted by Bruno Dias and six other members of Portugal's Communist Party, was accepted after a debate on October 4. "There is an urgent need to ensure interoperability and compatibility, both now and in the future, to enable access to our digital collection of historical and official documents of the Assembly", the seven parliamentarians write. "Access to these documents should not be made dependent on proprietary products." They also refer to the French parliament, currently migrating to an Open Source IT infrastructure.

During the debate on the resolution, several changes where made to the text.  The draft called for all PCs in use by the parliament to have Open Source applications installed for word processing, spread sheet presentations, web browsing, e-mail and other uses. This was changed to allow individual members of the Parliament to opt for such software. Also deleted from the resolution was a request to the IT department to study how to migrate to an Open Source IT infrastructure. The Parliament however resolved to reconsider this a year from now.

By committing itself to use open standards and Open Source, the parliament is defending the citizen's freedom of choice in accessing the parliament's documentation, Ansol, Portugal's National association for Free Software, said in a statement.

João Miguel Neves, Ansol's chair, hopes the parliament's plan will also allow citizens to use similar open document formats to communicate with their representatives. According to the organisation, Portugal's parliament at the moment can only accept electronic documents if submitted in one of Microsoft's proprietary formats.

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Further information:

• Resolution 227/X (in Portuguese)
• Questions and Answers on the resolution (in Portuguese)
• News item (in Portugese)