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)."

Comments

Re:Ironic

[serviscope_minor]

What is with the PDF allergy exhibited by a number of slashdotters?

It works fine in both xpdf and gs. In fact I've never encountered a PDF which doesn't display in either of those. Further more, as well as high-quality Free (tm) readers, there are also plenty of high quality Free tools for generating PDFs.

Seeing as the readers are small and lightweight, PDF is a better choice for final documents than ODF.

Future for FLOSS, ODF for internal docs

[Daengbo]

From the article:

Bob Jolliffe of the department of science and technology, who was part of the working group that compiled the document, ... was optimistic about the MIOS document's implementation, saying that it now cleared the playing field for the adoption of government's free and open source software policy.

Apparently there's a long-term strategy to move to FLOSS. The article also mentions that all internal documents will be ODF by 2009. Wow.