Digital PQ Launches
4 Comments
Recent Posts
The Law Bytes Podcast, Episode 231: Sara Bannerman on How Canadian Political Parties Maximize Voter Data Collection and Minimize Privacy Safeguards 
The Law Bytes Podcast, Episode 230: Aengus Bridgman on the 2025 Federal Election, Social Media Platforms, and Misinformation 
The Law Bytes Podcast, Episode 229: My Digital Access Day Keynote – Assessing the Canadian Digital Policy Record 
Queen’s University Trustees Reject Divestment Efforts Emphasizing the Importance of Institutional Neutrality 
The Law Bytes Podcast, Episode 228: Kumanan Wilson on Why Canadian Health Data Requires Stronger Privacy Protection in the Trump Era
Open standards formats but no free and open source software
Essentially, the proposition is to replace free and open source software with open standard formats.
With free and open source software, you would automatically get open standards formats. But without the requirements for software, there is no financial gain for the government. They would still pay foreign companies for using their proprietary software.
I cannot understand why they would want to remove the free and open source software from their proposition.
Quebec’s problem is not software or data
… it’s criss de chialeux de syndicaleux who want to get paid more and work less, all at the expense of taxpayers. I doubt that open standards and open data will solve that.
In response to Francis Bolduc
The proposition is not about open source software but open standards and open data. You don’t have to deal with both at the same time as they don’t solve the same problems.
Mandating open standards and open data tackles problems like data access, interoperability, data migration from a system to another and who ultimately owns and controls the data. Those are the sole problems the proposition tackles.
OSS would still benefit from the proposal since OSS uses open formats. This fact would give OSS an advantage versus proprietary software when the government goes to tender when buying software. The proposition would then help OSS get traction in government but also would force proprietary software to use open formats even in specialised fields like healthcare where open source software is almost non-existent and non-competitive, and where an OSS-only mandate is not possible.
I couldn’t find
what they considered to be an “open standard”. For instance, is “Office Open XML” (which is an ECMA and ANSI standard developed primarily by Microsoft and requiring a license from Microsoft considered to be an “open standard”?