South Africa’s Council for Scientific and Industrial Research Adopts OpenOffice.org
A press release announces that South Africa’s Council for Scientific and Industrial Research has adopted OpenOffice.org on over 2,500 computers, in order to take advantage of the ODF standard file format:
“CSIR President and CEO Dr Sibusiso Sibisi, a well-known proponent of OSS and the driving force behind the CSIR’s adoption, comments: “Open document standards are of prime importance for allowing open access to information, now and in the future. By using open document standards to store our data, the CSIR is not locked into a specific vendor that developed and implemented a proprietary standard, thus eliminating the risk of not being able to access current data in future when such a standard may cease to be supported,” he says. “The maturity of OpenOffice, a powerful open source office suite that implements ODF, has in turn enabled the CSIR to adopt ODF without major obstacles,” he adds…
“The CSIR’s move to open standards will ensure that scientific knowledge produced in the organisation is preserved for posterity and that it can be accessed without limitation to specific tools. In this regard, it will empower the science community, and indeed, ultimately the people of South Africa,” Sibisi concludes.
ODF allows anyone to use the tool of their choice to open, view, change, edit and store data. It also allows free exchange of information, irrespective of the software used and it is an ISO standard controlled by the non-profit Organisation for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards. ODF supports most office documents – text, spreadsheets, presentations, charts and graphical documents – and the standard is implemented by a range of applications and companies, including Google, IBM and Novell.”