The Dutch Government wants to increase the use of open standards and open source in some of its key IT projects, minister for Foreign Trade Frank Heemkskerk said on 3 December 2009. "There is not enough progress in the uptake of this type of software", said Heemskerk. "We need more perseverance. Using this type of software should be a social objective of public administrations." Heemskerk announced he would approach the other ministers in the cabinet to urge them to adopt open standards and open source applications.

lpOD -- languages & platforms OpenDocument

lpOD is an open source project whose aims are the definition of a Free Software API implementing the ISO/IEC 26300 standard, and the development, for higher level use cases, in Python, Perl and Ruby languages, of a top-down oriented application programming interface.

This release brings some significant improvements...

...on Nov. 24, the KOffice team released Version 2.1 of KOffice. KOffice is an integrated office suite built on the KDE platform. It utilizes free and open standards like OpenDocument for its document formats, component communication and component embedding. During the development of Version 2.1, it was also announced that KOffice is going to be used in the Nokia n900 smartphones based on Maemo Linux.

Read the complete article in eWeek.

Representatives from three
European member states, Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands, took part in the
second Open Document Format (ODF) interoperability workshop held in the Italian
town of Orvieto at the beginning of this month.

Mary P McRae, Director, Standards Development and Technical Committee Administration
OASIS initiated the public review procedure for Part 3 of the OpenDocument Format 1.2 specification on November 13, 2009.