Slashdot Mirror
South Africa Adopts ODF as a Government Standard
ais523 writes "As reported by Tectonic, South Africa's new Mininimum Interoperability Standards (pdf) for Information Systems in government (MIOS) explain the new rules for which data formats will be used by the government; according to that document, all people working for the South African government must be able to read OpenDocument Format documents by March, and the government aims to use one of its three approved document formats (UTF-8 or ASCII plain text, CSV, or ODF) for all its published documents by the end of 2008. A definition of 'open standard' is also included that appears to rule out OOXML at present (requiring 'multiple implementations', among other things that may also rule it out)."
that the link is a PDF?
-1 not first post
The FAQ clearly and explicitly states the politics section was for news relevant to US government politics.
Obviously this has nothing to do with the US government at all. It's about South Africa, so it shouldn't have been posted to the politics section.
Can't Open Office read/write OOXML files? And I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that the Mac OS 10.5 text editor can at least read OOXML files. I'm not advocating use of OOXML, simply pointing out that even if somehow they currently think there is only one implementation, that solution to the "OOXML problem" won't last long.
In a remarkable development, all the seven islands of the Seven Sister's Atoll, seceded from their common government and declared themselves independent sovereign nations. UN approved their nationhood in an emergency session. All of them, (population 7, 21, 3, 23, 7, 5, and 0.5 respectively) have immediately applied for the P membership of ISO. The population count of less than 1 raised a few eyebrows. It turned out to be the National Geographic photographer who camps there every summer. It is widely speculated in slashdot that all of the will soon vote to approve OOXML.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Put identity in the browser.
...and they beat us to open standards!!!
Have I missed it or does Google still not support saving/exporting documents in ODF?
-USR1
This guy better watch out for Steve "The Chair" Ballmer.
This is all nice, but we're running out of chairs now!
For whatever you want to fault it, doesn't OOXML have at least a couple of rough non-MS implementations (Novell, Corel, Thinkfree)?
What version of Openoffice are they using? I'm using version 2.3 and it knows that "minininum" is not a word...
www.purevolume.com/martyd
The thing to consider is that SA requires That could be a problem when trying to get the various old-versions-of-Word things to work, since the "intellectual rights" to "FuckShitUpLikeWord97" and "BreakCrapLikeWord95" are a) inextricably tied into the spec and b) absolutely not going to be forthcoming from MS for anyone who wants to actually produce a complete, fully-compliant implementation. Anyone think they even have those things defined in writing? I don't!
I'd say this one is game, set, and match to ODF. OOXML just cannot fulfill the access requirements if anyone tries to actually implement it in its entirety, and since it sounds like SA is on a total OSS kick one can probably safely assume that they will be demanding multiple implementations that comply down to every last comma, semi-colon and full-stop.
"God, root, what is difference?" - Pitr, userfriendly
Apparently "Mininimum Interoperability Standards" does not include spell-check capabilities.
LRN 2 SWM
Sorry for posting AC. This is huge. South Africa is a populous country.
However, does anyone have links to their analyses? One criticism in Massachusetts was that the Massachusetts CIO Office did not sufficiently evaluate all of the factors relevant to a transition to ODF. The Massachusetts comptroller issued a scathing audit listing the many items which their CIO should have looked at first, and failed to.
I have read the linked South African document and it is filled with the same types of conclusory statements as were issued in Massachusetts. This is all well and good and all, but where is the background information, all of the cost-benefit analysis and the like?
It would be VERY helpful for other jurisdictions which are contemplating a move to ODF (such as Minnesota and New York) to know that there exists somewhere the type of comprehensive analysis which the Massachusetts comptroller decided MUST be completed before making any format transition, and, after the full analysis, the decision still came out on the side of, "Yes, we SHOULD do this after all."
So, anyone, please? Any South African Slashdotters out there who can point to more detailed justification documentation?
Please, please, pretty please. You would be surprised who reads Slashdot and how just a little bit of assistance could move mountains in the real world.
A footnote specifically says that they are researching the possibility of adding Microsoft's XPS to the document standards.
The document also does not forbid the use of Microsoft products for the authoring of these documents, only the file format. If Microsoft were to create an upgrade/plugin save as ODF, then they could still use Office. Even without, they can save files as HTML, TXT, or CSV.
-David
It has already been a number of years since a government advisory panel in South Africa produced a survey and guidelines for open-source adoption. It was previously covered on Slashdot.
Unfortunately the original link has gone stale; here is one that works. The first version of the NACI document makes for interesting reading for the lay person.
Good to see ever-increasing open thinking there!
Salani kahle.
Maybe the government wants to protect their software-industry just as the US does with Microsoft?
While UTF8 raw text and ODF are both sensible formats, CSV seems like a poor choice for data owing to its horrible escaping conventions and subtly inconsistent implementations. Surely a better format would be a pipe separated DSV, which is a much cleaner format.
...Miss Teen South Carolina seem like a bit of a chump now doesn't it, eh?
No, your children are not the special ones. Nor are your pets.
The funny comment's irony is not because of some 'allergy'.
The irony is because South Africa didn't say PDF is a standard, yet they use it.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
I see more and more documents being passed as .odt files (well I am an IBM business partner so not totally typical) it is much more reasonable to expect the recipient to use one of many free ODF compliant products or they might have Notes 8 with the productivity editors than it is for someone to send a .docx file and expect the recipient to pay to upgrade to read and work with the file.
"That's what using Windows Vista with less than 1GB RAM is like.
Fixed.
OSx86 FTW
Actually, viewing ODF in Firefox is quite fast. No need for any suite to load. Besides, the are other suites beyond OpenOffice. Koffice and Workplace are two readily available examples.
Except of course that South Africa has a population of more than 45 million people. That's OK, I forgive your ignorance, after all you have that severe map shortage going on in the USA.
India's Business Standard reports that the Indian Government is mulling the switch to ODF. Can't wait...