04.21.08
OpenDocument Format Victorious in South Africa
We recently saw this in Brazil and now it’s another country from the southern hemisphere. Tectonic breaks the news about South Africa adopting ODF as a national standard.
The South African Bureau of Standards (SABS) on Friday approved the Open Document Format (ODF) as an official national South African standard. The adoption of ODF by South Africa opens the way for the businesses and government to adopt ODF more widely in their processes.
This is all very encouraging and also expected, unless some France-style corruptions were to take place. We recently saw a South African minister, Fraser-Moleketi, urging against OOXML and the software patents it’s associated with.
In other ODF news, there’s not much of the same level of impact, but the OpenOffice.org team has begun boasting some new icons.
In Windows or KDE (Linux), drag OpenOffice.org from the start menu to the desktop. In GNOME, right click the OpenOffice.org menu entry and then choose Add this launcher to desktop.
Support ODF, which is likely to be the only ISO standard when the storm is over. If not, the clouds hanging over OOXML’s head will make it controversial enough to be worth avoiding. Just watch what is already happening in Europe, which has clearly seen enough. █
Highlight: Novell was the first to acknowledge that Microsoft FUD tactics had substance. Novell then used anti-Linux FUD to market itself. 
Highlight: Xandros let Microsoft make patent claims and brag about (paid-for) OOXML support. 
Highlight: Linspire's CEO not only fell into Microsoft arms, but he also assisted the company's attack on GNU/Linux. 
Highlight: Microsoft craves pseudo (proprietary) standards and gets its way using proxies and influence which it buys. 
Highlight: The invasion into the open source world is intended to leave Linux companies neglected, due to financial incentives from Microsoft. 
Analysis: Xen, an open source hypervisor, possibly fell victim to Microsoft's aggressive (and stealthy) acquisition-by-proxy strategy.
SubSonica said,
April 24, 2008 at 3:28 am
Maybe far fetched but possible; anyway: a movement worth keeping an eye on, time will tell:
1 South Africa choses ODF/ISO26300 (and NOT MSOOXML) as National standards:
http://www.tectonic.co.za/?p=2365
http://www.oss.gov.za/MIOS_V4.1_final.pdf (page 19)
(BTW, this happens little after the ISO battle and after the south african minister of public service and administration slammed software patents and Microsoft for not adopting ODF: http://www.tectonic.co.za/?p=2304)
2 Jason Matusow (Microsoft’s director of corporate standards) flies to South Africa to do “external outreach”
http://blogs.msdn.com/jasonmatusow/archive/2008/04/23/participation-in-standards.aspx
(maybe “covert-ops” at policy level rather than just “outreach are in the making?”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covert_ops )
Join the dots to get the bigger picture….is a reversal of the policy favouring ODF in the horizon? Microsoft no doubt sooner or later will attempt it.