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Summary: Latest raves and wins for ODF at the government level

Yoon Kit proudly announces that according to MAMPU, "There are nearly 300 agencies using ODF already - and a detailed study will be conduct to roll out further." Also he adds: "Glad to say after all the work, ODF has been approved by the minister as a Malaysian Standard!" John Drinkwater points it out too.

Malaysia is not the only country where such positive transformation is occurring despite sheer abuse from Microsoft (and possibly violations of the Malaysian law). Here is a wonderful report from Brazil (also in Portuguese):

After the speech, when I left the room where the President spoke, I was very happy to see the joy of Furusho, because he gave an ODF cap to Lula and the crown took some photos of Lula with the cap. This is the kind of stuff that made Furusho’s work to be recognized by the ODF Alliance with the ODF Awards (and detail: it was Furusho’s initiative to produce the ODF shirts and caps and endure into the crowd to deliver them to President Lula. I really admire this crazy Nipo-Brazillian folk :) ).

Here is the famous photo (Brazil's president wearing an ODF hat), with many more here and more extensive coverage here. ⬆

"That particular meeting was followed by an anonymous smear campaign against one of the TC members. A letter was faxed to the organization of the TC member in question, accusing the TC member in question of helping politicize the issue (which is, of course, untrue). I too had the dubious pleasure of hearing first hand how Microsoft attempted to remove me from the TC (they did not succeed, thanks to integrity and cojones of the organization I am affiliated with)."

"If this unethical behaviour by Microsoft was not sufficiently despicable, they did the unthinkable by involving politics in what should have been a technical evaluation of the standard by writing to the head of the Malaysian standards organization and getting its business partners to engage in a negative letter writing campaign to indicate lack of support of ODF in the Malaysian market. Every single negative letter on ODF received by the Malaysian standards organization was written either by Microsoft, or a Microsoft business partner or a Microsoft affiliated organization (Initiative for Software Choice and IASA)."

A Memo to Patrick Durusau