North-by-South points out another country adopting ODF in its article, Venezuela Adopts ODF as National Standard:

“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, South Africa, Belgium — overall, fourteen national and eight provincial governments.”

Many countries, provinces and cities have adopted ODF, because it is about competition on a fair playing field, and just like HTML, it will bring lots of new competitors, ideas, processes and products into a market that has long been stymied by the decadence of a monopoly. Already, ODF is supported by many companies and many products:

“It is currently implemented by office solutions such as OpenOffice, KOffice, Google Docs, Zoho, IBM Lotus Symphony and Corel Wordperfect. In May 2008, Microsoft announced that Service Pack 2 for Microsoft Office 2007 would add native support for the Open Document Format.”

With momentum like this, we can expect great things for ODF and its users in the future.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 21st, 2008 at 9:37 am and is filed under Free Culture, ODF. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.