The Dutch government program "Netherlands in Open Connection" and OpenDoc Society have announced the public availability of a beta version of Officeshots.org. Officeshots is an online webservice that makes it possible to compare the output quality of various office suites as well as web-based productivity applications.

Document Freedom Day is a global day for document liberation. It will be a day of grassroots effort to educate the public about the importance of Open Document Formats and Open Standards in general. Every year on the last wednesday in March, we celebrate his day.

"Last Friday, 24th of April, the foundations for vendor independent ICT education in the Netherlands were laid down.

The ODF Plugfest is a Conference whose goal is to to achieve the maximum interoperability between competing applications, platforms and technologies in the area of digital document sharing, and to promote the OpenDocument format (ODF). This is a short technical summary, primarily aimed at developers, of what happened during the first day of the conference

The Dutch government has set a soft deadline of April 2008 for its agencies to start using open-source software -- freely distributed programs that anyone can modify -- the Netherlands Economic Affairs Ministry said Thursday.

Stani - member of the Dutch Ubuntu community - won a design competition for the new 5 euro commemorative coin with the theme 'Netherlands and Architecture'. This design will be realized and will be a legal coin within the Netherlands. What is very special, is that he made the design soley with free software! Isn't that cool?

Recently the Dutch government adopted a plan called - translated - 'Netherlands Open in Connection' * which describes how the system of tenders should be changed to migrate to open source software and software conforming to open standards. However, the very same Department of Finance that wrote this plan - because the parliament asked for it - has written a 'closed' document covered under copyright for a closed tender which is called 'GOUD' (Gold). For a large part, the tender indirectly only allows Microsoft software it seems**. Last time there was a closed tender, Microsoft was awarded a deal of €156M worth of software and Michael Robertson's Linspire €6M alternative was not even considered***.

In China the issue about the document format standard is even more complicated, because there's also the national standard UOF. Consequently, Chinese standardization organizations have to think what they need to do to proceed. Should they support a third standard, or not? How about unifying UOF with one or both of these standards?

This week the Dutch government will discuss a proposal to switch as much as possible to open standards and open source software. The Microsoft director for the Netherlands, Theo Rinsema, responded that Microsoft is not objecting to open standards, but the proposal excludes too many not open standards, like PDF, MP3 and GSM, which are widely accepted standards.