As I already explained in another article file formats are extremely important: unless, at least in Public Administrations (PAs), only open file formats are used, serious amounts of public money can go to waste, important public digital documents may become unreadable and private citizens or businesses may be forced to useless expenses if they want to interact with PAs.

If you know software programming well enough to write a new word processor with a secret file format, do it now, put it on sale and price it one million Euro per seat. Should that law be approved, you'll just have to send
Christmas greetings to all Italian Public Administrations to force them to buy your software.

"a new initiative promoted by the italian association for free software for the next italian political elections (provided that they will actually take place…). the initiative consists in asking the candidates to sign a letter where they engage themselves, in case they will be elected, to promote the use of free software through their political activity.

The Italian region Puglia will make the use of open source software and open standards mandatory for its public administrations. A law, adopted on 2 December by the regional administration, instructs regional and local public administrations to use open formats for the electronic disseminations of documents, and wherever possible use free and open source software.

The Italian Constitutional Court just published its decision: two articles of a 2009 Italian regional law that promotes Free Software and open digital standards violate the Italian Constitution. It will be VERY interesting now to find how many other local laws (both in Italy and in OTHER countries) have similar problems...

Free/Open Source software is great for Public Administrations, but Free/Open data are even more important. Making public sector information really accessible, that is publishing online raw data in open formats and under open licenses, can both improve transparency in government and foster local economical and cultural activities.

The council of the government of the autonomous province of Trentino on Wednesday morning approved a law on free and open source software and open data. The law instructs public administrations to prepare migrations plans to switch to free and open source software and to make its software applications available as open source.

The greatest Italian event of and about Public Administration - asked me to chair the only open source conference taking place in the event.

Six months ago I got a request to check what Microsoft had said in a report about Italian public administrations rejecting OpenDocument as mandatory format, so I tried to contact MS Italy to know more. Since I'm still waiting for them, and in general Microsoft asking for "file format neutrality" is a bit ridiculous, I've decided to ask again, in public