South Africa's embrace of ODF is not news, but progress is clearly being made.

A week before the workshop the South African government became the latest country in the world to adopt the OpenDocument Format (ODF) as a government standard for information exchange.

IBM makes progress as well. It has just released another beta of Symphony, which is built upon open standards (ODF).

So far, Symphony is only available in English, but Beta 3, which is due by the end of the year, will include support for 23 languages, Rhodin said. "We're pretty serious about this," he said.

There is also a brand-new commercial for Symphony (not that we try to advertise anything).



A 'cash cow' turned into a vending machine.