"Speaking at the Second ODF Workshop in Pretoria, South Africa, yesterday, Carlos Gonzalez of the National Center of Information Technologies, announced that the Venezuelan government had formally adopted ODF as a standard for the ‘processing, exchange and storage of documents’.” Venezuela joins a number of other countries who have adopted this open standard, along with Brazil, Uruguay, Sout

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. ODF is already an international standard, approved by the International Standards Organisation, or ISO.

Venezuela became the latest in a string of countries to appeal the approval of Microsoft's Office Open XML file format as an international standard. The format was approved in an international vote after a fast-track process that several participating countries say was flawed.

Hungary starts embracing more Free software, but Novell is a mismatch. THIS is not yet another report about Microsoft's corruption in Hungary [1, 2, 3]. Hungary is actually beginning to soften (not Soften) and consider Free software. Mistakenly however, an official in Hungary lists Novell as a prime candidate, despite the fact that Novell - by its own admission - is merely a mixed source company.

Sweden approved ODF as a national standard. Too bad my country, Portugal, doesn't do the same. :\

Beyond expressing a preference, does anything else need to be done to make sure that governments that say they are going "open source" really do so?" Quotas -- dictating specific percentages of open source usage -- seem an obvious answer, but in countries that have tried them, open source has not necessarily flourished. One country where quotas on open source use have been instituted is Hungary.

In China the issue about the document format standard is even more complicated, because there's also the national standard UOF. Consequently, Chinese standardization organizations have to think what they need to do to proceed. Should they support a third standard, or not? How about unifying UOF with one or both of these standards?

Vietnam has just made ODF a national standard whilst other new gains are noted

Hungary decided to re-vote due to irregularities. Here is the rest of the story, notes by Tomka Gergely, who attended the second meeting as a technical expert.