The Hungarian government has decided that, from April 2012, public administrations in Hungary should only provide official documents in internationally recognised open standards-based document formats and must be able to accept and process such documents. Quoting Hungarian media, a report on the EU Joinup collaboration platform said that only the Ministry of Defence will have more time to switch to using open document formats.

Without explicitly mentioning either OpenOffice or LibreOffice, the Hungarian government recommends that public administrations and other public organisations switch to free open source office software – otherwise, they will need to give reasons for their continued use of proprietary software.

According to a news report on the Hungarian news site IT Cafe, last June a spokesperson explained that the intention was to move the whole government sector over to using the Open Document Format (ODF), the default format for both OpenOffice and LibreOffice.

The government also decided that the licence for proprietary office suites in all schools will not be renewed – the current licence expires on 1 March. The Hungarian ministry of Education explained that "The ministry is convinced that the needs of the educational institutions can be satisfied by using free and open source software".

The switch was announced to the affected organisations some time ago – according to the Deputy State Secretary for Information Technology, Vilmos Vályi-Nagy, the Hungarian authorities have been preparing for this change for months.

(ehe)