After the UK has committed to switching to the Open Document Format, a few members of the European Parliament are now pushing to do the same thing.

More and more administrations are considering the adoption of the Open Document Format, which is usually accompanied by a switch to open source software. The UK government is still deciding whether to use the ODF format (open document format), but the decision is practically made.

It was just a matter of time until the European Union started to think about doing the same thing, although they are still far away from a formal debate. The things move very slowly in the European Union legislature because this is not about just one country and there's a lot of bureaucracy involved.

Indrek Tarand, a member of the European Parliament, said that the European institutions should switch to using the Open Document Format. According to a report from joinup.ec.europa.eu, this statement was made during a meeting of the European Parliament's Free Software User Group (Epfsug).

"The day the EU authorities decide to switch to using the ODF standard, our work is done. The European Parliament should also be able to use its own free software distribution. We've been asking this for the past five years, we're still alive and we're still knocking at the door," said Indrek Tarand, who is also the founder of the Free Software User Group (Epfsug).

He is also the member of The Greens–European Free Alliance, a group of MPs in the European Parliament. The group is testing a number of ten laptop computers that are running a modified Debian distro called Pearl.

The IT department of the European Parliament has expressed its interest in the project, which is testing full disk encryption and the use of cryptographic software tools provided by GnuPG.

As you can imagine, Microsoft will probably not sit idly on the sidelines while these decisions are being made. The adoption of the open document format would be a very heavy blow for its economic interests, even if the EU chooses to keep both the DOC and the ODF formats.

It's also well known that Microsoft and the EU are not exactly friends and the American company has been sanctioned a number of times already for its practices. It remains to be seen what the European Parliament will eventually do, but it's very likely that ODF is going to get adopted sooner or later.