Hungarian government sponsors development of ODF tools

We learn from Joinup that Hungary’s government is investing some €1.23 million in a three-year project to improve applications which use Open Document Format (ODF). The funds are being split between the University of Szeged’s Software Engineering Department and Multiracio, an open source IT specialist developing EuroOffice office applications based on the LibreOffice and OpenOffice productivity suites.

The project aims to assure the quality of the ODF tools, resulting in new ways to collaborate on documents using this open standard file format and improve tools for mobile computing devices that can create and use ODF, explained Kázmér Koleszár, one of the software developers at Multiracio.

“The University of Szeged will do the quality assurance and usability related research and tool development. Multiracio will develop the office application and work on several extensions.”

The university will also work on improving ways to analyse the software source code and come up with ways to visualise and report on the quality of code. Another research topic is a tool to test the usability of the user interface.

Wouldn’t it be lovely to see encouraging stories like the above coming out of the UK public sector instead of the usual run of disappointing or worrying news?