Information Society Watch

October 24, 2007, Alastair Otter & James Archibald, Tectonic

The South African government has released a Minimum Interoperability Standards for Information Systems in government (MIOS) document. The document explicitly defines an open standard and includes the Open Document format (ODF) as an official standard for South African government communications. The article suggests that the implementation of the MIOS document is now the most important task, as it paves the way for the government to adopt positive FOSS policy. The document spells out the community-based, 'no rights reserved' nature of open standards and offers a timeline for the document's implementation in four steps, with a final goal of consuming/producing all future documents in ODF and converting past documents into ODF or other non-propriety formats. South Africa's MIOS is especially promising in its efforts to remove any mention of specific vendors, such as Microsoft, who has so far unsuccessfully attempted to have its own Office Open XML standard approved as an open standard by the ISO.

Read full text