Polish Ministry of Internal Affairs, responsible for National Computerization project is currently working on National Interoperability Framework. The framework regulates three types of activities: Administration to Business (A2B), Administration to Citizens (A2C) and internal (A2A). Its main goal is to provide good practices and regulations concerning building and maintaining e-government services.

A similar framework has been introduced by the European Union in 2003: EUROPEAN INTEROPERABILITY FRAMEWORK FOR PAN-EUROPEAN eGOVERNMENT SERVICES. It defines general ideas and goals but has no direct influence on national law of particular European countries. It only recommends the creation of national frameworks that follow similar ideas.

First draft of the Polish Interoperability Framework was introduced by the Ministry in May 2007 as a result of the National Computerization Program accepted by the Council of Ministers of the Government of Poland in April this year. The framework more or less follows the general ideas of the European document, but there are major differences, especially concerning the key issue for the FLOSS community — the attitude to open-source software.

Open source software

The European framework recommends the usage of open source software directly:

Open Source Software (OSS) tends to use and help define open standards and publicly available specifications. OSS products are, by their nature, publicly available specifications, and the availability of their source code promotes open, democratic debate around the specifications, making them both more robust and interoperable. As such, OSS corresponds to the objectives of this Framework and should
be assessed and considered favorably alongside proprietary alternatives

The Polish draft however does not even mention this issue. Instead the term “technical independence” is used which basically means that no software should be favored (neither open source nor proprietary).

Open standards

The term “open standard” is defined in the national draft directly basing on the definition provided by the European framework:

• The standard is adopted and will be maintained by a not-for-profit organization, and its ongoing development occurs on the basis of an open decision-making procedure available to all interested parties (consensus or majority decision etc.).
• The standard has been published and the standard specification document is available either freely or at a nominal charge. It must be permissible to all to copy, distribute and use it for no fee or at a nominal fee
• The intellectual property - i.e. patents possibly present - of (parts of) the standard is made irrevocably available on a royalty-free basis.
• There are no constraints on the re-use of the standard.

This basically means that Microsoft’s Office Open XML will not be treated as open standard, thus not preferred in Polish e-Government services, making OpenDocument Format the office standard of choice. Of course as long as this definition finds its way to the final text.

There is however a big lobby for changing this definition to a more “liberal” one. It will probably get more and more intense in the very future, concerning that Microsoft is fighting for getting an ISO certificate for its new child.

Consultations with the FLOSS community

The positive sign is that the Ministry is very open for discussion with Polish free and open source community. It directly cooperates with KROS — Coalition for Open Standards, which associates both corporations (Novell, IBM, Sun, Adobe) and non-profit foundations and communities (Wikimedia Poland, Internet Society Poland, etc). Other representatives of the FLOSS community were also invited for discussion, including myself.

What’s next?

We’ll probably have to wait for the final version of the national framework until the end of 2007 and a lot of things may change till this time. We certainly hope that the Ministry confirm the decision to promote both open standards and change its attitude to preferring open-source software, which seems to best fulfill the main objectives of the draft act.

Currently all options are open. We will keep you informed when more information about the act being created are available.

Borys Musielak