Ironically, when the EU asked for feedback on new tech rules, it locked the process to dear old Microsoft. A fast, focused campaign forced officials to add an open format instead.
Here’s something that the me that was growing up in the days following World War II never thought I’d say, but gee it’d be nice if the US government could learn to respond quickly to the will of the people the way the EU seems to do.
On Friday, FOSS Force republished an article from The Document Foundation/LibreOffice website about an oversight by the EU Commission that played right into the hands of proprietary software vendors — specifically Microsoft. It was also drop-dead stupid, which might be why the will of the people was so quickly heard and heeded.
The article was by Italo Vignoli, TDF’s co-founder and major spokesperson, and it called the EU Commission out for failing to follow its own rules.
It seems that after years of calling for open standards, vendor neutrality, and digital sovereignty — while recommending open formats for public sector digital services — the Commission pulled something of a boner. It published a form for its citizens to fill out and return, seeking their opinion on the Cyber Resilience Act, which among other things is supposed to protect the EU from things like being held hostage to costly proprietary formats.
The trouble was, the form was only being made available in the .xlsx format, which is the standard file format for modern Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. Although the format has technically been an open standard since the early 2000s, like other once-proprietary formats developed by Microsoft, many open source advocates consider it to still be proprietary. As Vignoli said, it “makes interoperability extremely difficult due to its ever-changing and undocumented features.”
In his article, he added a call to action by asking readers to copy and sign a letter included in the article that urged the Commission to review its template distribution practices and adopt a format-neutral (read: truly open and truly free software) approach going forward.
“This is not a minor procedural oversight,” he added. “It is a structural bias built into the process which sends out a clear message: full participation in EU policymaking requires a Microsoft license.”
Readers did respond, and evidently in great enough numbers to cause the EU Commission to immediately act. Later on the same day that Vignoli’s article was published, he posted an update on The Document Foundation’s website:
“The European Commission has accepted our request, and starting from today – Friday March 6 – has added the Open Document Format ODS version of the spreadsheet to be used to provide the feedback. We are grateful to the people working at DG CONNECT, the Commission’s Directorate-General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology, for responding to our request within 24 hours. At this point, the rest of this message is no longer relevant, and the call for action is no longer necessary.”
Good for Vignoli, good for The Document Foundation’s and LibreOffice’s communities of supporters, and good for the European Commission. Again, it would be nice to see the US government respond so quickly to citizen-generated petitions.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
Good outcome, but it should not have been necessary.
The EU needs to start walking the walk – if they’d been using LibreOffice, then this very embarrassing oversight most likely woucd not have occurred.