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
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!!!
You must have missed it. Google Docs supports ODF for documents and spreadsheets, but not presentations (only .ppt for now). In fact, they've supported it for a while (I exported a document to ODF back in May).
Hydraulic pizza oven!! Guided missile! Herring sandwich! Styrofoam! Jayne Mansfield! Aluminum siding! Borax!
Yep, missed it. But the "Save as OpenDocument" is only available from the "Docs Home" page under "More actions". It's not available when you're editing the document from the File menu.
Thanks!
-USR1
Sorry, yes I also forgot that OpenOffice's default format is ODF.
-USR1
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
It gives you the chance to compare your government with one which takes a common-sense approach to document formats.
You can cry now, if you want to.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Actually, as soon as Ballmer heard, he despatched one of Microsoft's Special Ops "negotiators" in a private jet to Pretoria.
Fortunately for the Africans, the "negotiator" bailed out halfway across the South Atlantic ocean. In a statement released later he said;
The flight had been going well until I dozed off for a minute or two, then woke to see blue screens on the panel in front of me. By the time I realised it was just the sky, I had my chute on and was halfway out the escape hatch..."I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
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.
No - you can use Microsoft Office. You can use Windows. You can use any damn software you want. This is not about software - it's about document formats and open standards.
It's only because Microsoft have been so successful in binding their software to their formats, that when someone chooses another format, people think it's about the software!