Open Standards in Portugal

[Marcos Marado]

Hi there,

On Monday 31 October 2011 10:45:04 Otto Kekäläinen wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> 2011/10/26 Marcos Marado <mindboosternoori at gmail.com>:
> > In Portugal, after having a law that forces the Government to use Open
> > Standards, there's now this division defining how and which open
> > standards to support... The consultation about it ends at the 30th, and
> > we're still in the middle of the work for it. Several questions already
> > rose, tho... And I'm
> 
> > hoping someone can help us answering them in this last few days:
> Sorry I missed the deadline.

No problem, this is just one of the steps for this process, and your feedback 
is very appreciated...

> > * TLS 1.1 or 1.2 (since the biggest F.S. browsers don't support it)
> >  * is it true that konqueror supports them?
> >  * is it true that midori supports them?
> >  * is there any (free software) mail client that supports SMTPS, POP3S
> > and IMAP3S using TLS 1.1 or 1.2 (which one?)
> 
> I think neither Firefox nor Thuderbird support TLS 1.1 or TLS 1.2,
> even though it has been underway for a few years now (both use NSS). I
> don't think we should advocate old standards just because some FOSS
> does not support it, rather do it the other way, use the standard
> requirement as an argument to get funding from the public sector to
> implement support in FOSS (although I'm sure it's not easy).

Yeah, that was/is our general position, even if it's not that easy to do 
recomendations in that state, without giving implementation examples... And 
while I would love to see the funding from the public sector to implement 
support in FOSS, I surely won't hold my breath.

> > * is there any free software at all supporting (even if only partially)
> > the XBRL standard?
> 
> Never heard.

Not only it seems this is silently starting to be mandatory in an hell lot of 
countries (which caught me by surprise, I only noticed it to search for this 
matter...), it is encumbered with patents, so not considered by us as an open 
standard.

> I think open standards is the way to go. Governments should enforce
> them by requiring support with clausules like "X standard version x.x
> or newer" where the x.x should be the version of the standard that was
> released at least three years ago. In some software, free or not,
> cannot keep up with the standard in three years, we should put effort
> in software development rather than lobbying for stagnation in
> standards requirements.. sometimes this can be though, dough.

Agreed. It actually caught my attention that the work we're doing in Portugal 
for this, and some other countries do/did for the same purpose would give us 
quite good material for a list of "things needed", both regarding open 
standards and free software supporting them...

Best regards, and thanks for your reply,
-- 
Marcos Marado
ANSOL -- http://ansol.org