Microsoft is citing customer demand to explain its change of heart. While I doubt that many customers asked for ODF in particular, it's clear that there's sufficient demand for better document format standards in general. Microsoft believed that it could satisfy these demands by crafting its own format, and by pushing it through the ISO standards process.

Last month, President "Lula" da Silva appointed open source veteran Marcos Mazoni as the new head of the federal committee for free software implementation. This interview gets more detail from Mazoni about his experiences managing free software migrations at some of Brazil's biggest IT companies.

In an interesting twist (interesting for Microsoft and their OOXML apologists), about a month ago, MAMPU, the Malaysian Administrative Modernisation and Management Planning Unit, decided that they were going to go OpenOffice.org and go ODF, and dump Microsoft Office by year-end 2008. This made its round around news sites, and everyone was naturally talking about it.

Misapplication of “value for money” requirements when purchasing software results in poor value for money - Government purchasing policies for software tend to support the creation of monopolies.

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.

Argentina's congress is actively considering a bill that would require all government offices to use open-source software. It's partly a cost-saving move, and partly a way to bring the Argentine government into compliance with its software licensing

I have been saying this for many years: free software must not be associated with an ideology or political party.

A few days ago we wrote about European nations that rejected OOXML. We later showed how Microsoft/CompTIA lobbyist Jan van den Beld made implicit threats against governments that ‘dare’ to refuse and ignore OOXML.