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)."

Re:Ironic

[idiotwithastick]

It's not the end 2008 yet. Apparently their standards haven't changed. Still, I would've expected them to put up a version in odf format.

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.

Re:Ironic

[Gabest]

Beautiful on the outside, ugly in the inside. Please think of the programmers!

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.

I'm confused...

[martin_henry]

What version of Openoffice are they using? I'm using version 2.3 and it knows that "minininum" is not a word...

CSV?

[Bee1zebub]

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.

Re:Breaking news:

[Siener]

Your point is well made. Why the hell would anyone care about the state of OSS in South Africa [wikipedia.org]? The next thing you know Slashdot will probably start covering that other South African loser [wikipedia.org] and his rediculous project [wikipedia.org].

Good point...

[Anonymous Coward]

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 [youtube.com] going on in the USA.

Re:Breaking news:

[Lord Ender]

South Africa is larger (by population and by geography) than any country in Europe. It is also a Western country--English speaking, democratic, capital markets... it's not an Atoll at all (unless you consider France to be an Atoll, too).