The South African Bureau of Standards (SABS) on Friday approved the Open Document Format (ODF) as an official national South African standard. The adoption of ODF by South Africa opens the way for the businesses and government to adopt ODF more widely in their processes.
This is all very encouraging and also expected, unless some France-style corruptions were to take place. We recently saw a South African minister, Fraser-Moleketi, urging against OOXML and the software patents it's associated with.
In other ODF news, there's not much of the same level of impact, but the OpenOffice.org team has begun boasting some new icons.
In Windows or KDE (Linux), drag OpenOffice.org from the start menu to the desktop. In GNOME, right click the OpenOffice.org menu entry and then choose Add this launcher to desktop.
Comments
SubSonica
2008-04-24 08:28:12
1 South Africa choses ODF/ISO26300 (and NOT MSOOXML) as National standards: http://www.tectonic.co.za/?p=2365
http://www.oss.gov.za/MIOS_V4.1_final.pdf (page 19)
(BTW, this happens little after the ISO battle and after the south african minister of public service and administration slammed software patents and Microsoft for not adopting ODF: http://www.tectonic.co.za/?p=2304)
2 Jason Matusow (Microsoft's director of corporate standards) flies to South Africa to do "external outreach" http://blogs.msdn.com/jasonmatusow/archive/2008/04/23/participation-in-standards.aspx (maybe "covert-ops" at policy level rather than just "outreach are in the making?" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covert_ops )
Join the dots to get the bigger picture....is a reversal of the policy favouring ODF in the horizon? Microsoft no doubt sooner or later will attempt it.