Open Standards in Portugal

Otto Kekäläinen otto at fsfe.org
Mon Oct 31 10:45:04 UTC 2011


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.

> * 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).

http://support.mozilla.com/fi/questions/781028
https://wiki.mozilla.org/NSS:Roadmap

There is also a comparison in Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_e-mail_clients#SSL_and_TLS_support
but it reflects the support for TLS 1.0

I tried to look up closer the situation of Evolution mail, but I
didn't find any info about 1.1 or 1.2 (at least TLS 1.0 is supported).

> * SQL 92 and SQL 99 - is there any free software database supporting
>  completely any of this two standards?

I don't think anybody supports completely these standards, but many
support the core parts. PostgreSQL boasts with its conformance. An
explanation is here:
http://developer.postgresql.org/pgdocs/postgres/features.html

> * is there any free software at all supporting (even if only partially) the
>  XBRL standard?

Never heard.


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.

-- 
Otto Kekäläinen                   []         otto at fsfe.org
Finnish Team Coordinator        [][][]  GPG/PGP 0xB7F7E4E1
Free Software Foundation Europe   ||      +358 44 566 2204
http://www.fsfe.org/                      finland at fsfe.org



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