Looks like the Norwegian made a step forward regarding open standards:
Public enterprises should not use other file formats than ODF (version 1.1) and PDF as attachment at the exchange of documents by email. This rule will apply from 1. January 2011.
Besides ODF, they also decided on an encoding, so UTF8 character set standard will be for all new government IT projects.
Source: digi.no and Leif Lodahl
Free Software Universe 
This is great! One could hope the swedes copy this quickly, but right now it looks pretty bad, the government has no clue in IT policy making. But if Norway goes far ahead, it is bound to come here eventually!
Reading the articles, even more goodies. Amazing they are making this policy.
There are specifications like:
For music if lossily compressed, they should be encoded as Vorbis and “enclosed” in Ogg..
For lossless audio, FLAC shall be used..
Video shall be encoded in Theora and in a parallel format of choice, H.264 recommended..
SVG recommended for vector art
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It will be interesting to see if Norway’s choice of Ogg Theora affects the positions of Opera or QtSoftwae (Nokia) on HTML5 video tag.
This is definitely great news. If they ever produce a White Paper explaining the rationale behind their choices in English, it could become a commendable reference textbook to convince other nations to do the same.
Note, OOXML is still in the standards guide, albeit in “under observation” status. They are not finished assessing the case for inclusion of IS/IEC 29500/2008 yet.
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