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

Why not let their computers do it?

[NemoinSpace]

...all people working for the South African government must be able to read OpenDocument Format documents by March,

You think it would be hard enough to get computers to read odf, now they are mandating people do it? Won't someone think of the children!

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.

Breaking news:

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

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.

Re:Ironic

[ChameleonDave]

OK, I've just RTFA.

This is all relevant only for "Working Office Document formats". For final presentation, they're using PDF. For web pages, they're using HTML 4 or XHTML with testing in Firefox 2 and IE6, plus later versions. What is it with this tradition of inaccurate summaries on Slashdot?

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.

Damn, they beat us at the rugby...

[rHBa]

...and they beat us to open standards!!!

Multiple, COMPLETE implementations?

[sn00ker]

A few people have mentioned that OOXML has been "implemented" by a few applications. Completely? Compliant with all umpteen-thousand pages of the spec? No, didn't think so.
The thing to consider is that SA requires

the intellectual rights required to implement the standard (eg essential patent claims) are irrevocably available, without royalties attached

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.

Re:Politics For Nerds?!!

[ozmanjusri]

Obviously this has nothing to do with the US government at all.

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.