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Welcome to the GITOC OSS site
Current chairperson of the Government IT Officers Council (GITOC) OSS working group: Aslam Raffee
Please register in order to contribute to this very interesting debate......
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Document Freedom Day – 26 March
Posted by: Aslam on Wednesday, March 26, 2008 - 02:55 PM EET
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739 Reads
The Document Freedom Day (DFD) is a global day of celebration which is supported by a group of organisations and companies, including, but not limited to the Free Software Foundation Europe, ODF Alliance, OpenForum Europe, IBM, Red Hat and Sun Microsystems, Inc.
"We're proud to support this global effort to encourage open and inclusive information exchange," said Marino Marcich, Managing Director, OpenDocument Format Alliance on the documentfreedom.org website. "Document freedom means creating, exchanging, and preserving your electronic documents without having to buy software from a particular vendor."
ODF, or the opendocument format, is a file format for representing word-processor, spreadsheet and presentation files. It is an ISO standard (ISO/IEC 26300:2006) which has received enthusiastic support from vendors and governments worldwide. In the past year Malaysia, Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, Germany, Brazil, South Africa and a host of others have all given ODF the thumbs up as a medium for interoperable document exchange. The format has been developed through an open, collaborative process and is freely available to implementors world-wide.
It is appropriate to be able to announce on this day that you will soon be able to send ODF files to any government department. In line with the open standards policy of government, all government departments should be able to read ODF files by the 1 April. We are also eagerly awaiting the publication of the ODF format as a new South African national standard, SANS26300. Publication is due around the middle of April.
Currently there are a number of ways of creating and working with ODF files. The vast majority of which are available at no cost. Probably the most popular way on Microsoft Windows is to download one of the freely available open source office suites such as OpenOffice from http://www.openoffice,org. If you have Gnu/Linux then OpenOffice will normally be installed by default. Alternatives include using the online Google Docs at http://docs.google.com. There are a number of others which are being actively developed including IBM Lotus Symphony and a variety of plugins for Microsoft Office.
“An open, unhindered exchange of information in all areas of life is of fundamental importance for today's knowledge-based society. It is an important foundation for our shared objective: a peaceful, democratic, pluralistic society. The Open Document Format, as a completely open and ISOstandardized format, is an excellent vehicle for the free exchange of knowledge and information in the globalized age.”
German Federal Minister for Foreign Affairs,
Dr Frank-Walter Steinmeier
comments?  
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Government embraces open source
Posted by: yocto on Monday, February 26, 2007 - 02:24 PM EET
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2399 Reads
[ Cape Town | ITWeb, 22 February 2007 ] - Government today committed to open source implementation within its departments. It also delivered several other statements concerning ICT.
At the Cabinet media briefing in Parliament today, government said it had approved a policy and strategy for open source implementation. It added that all new software developed for, or by government, will be based on open standards, and government will migrate current software to open source.
“This strategy will, among other things, lower administration costs and enhance local IT skills,” said the Cabinet statement.
Cabinet spokesman Themba Maseko said, in reply to a question, that the process would probably be a lengthy one. He noted that a project office would be set up by April, by the Department of Science and Technology, with the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, and the State IT Agency.
The Cabinet statement said all major IT vendors in the country have supported the initiative and made contributions to the development of open source.
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SITA OSS Tender Delayed
Posted by: DanieVDM on Tuesday, July 04, 2006 - 09:05 AM EET
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11652 Reads
From http://www.tectonic.co.za/view.php?id=736
Submissions for the State Information Technology Agency (Sita) open source tender closed in October this year, with at least 12 technology companies vying to be placed on the preferred list of open source suppliers to the South African government over the next three years.
Information officer at the SITA Tender Board, Tinus Lourens, says the evaluation of the bids is scheduled to be completed by 2 December. However, even if the evaluation board meets this deadline, it is unlikely the Supplier Selection Authority (SSA) -- the board that ultimately awards tenders -- will meet to decide the winner of the tender before mid-January next year. The evaluation board's recommendations first have to be passed by the Supplier Selection Board before they get to the SSA.
Lourens says the SSA is unlikely to meet on December 20, the earliest realistic date that an award decision could be made. "The chances are very slim that that will happen," he says.
He says the progress of the tender is viewable through SITA's website, adding that the results of the tender will be published on the website once the companies involved have been notified. Lourens predicts an announcement by the beginning of February.
The tender attracted interest from a large number of technology suppliers, with IBM, Novell, Business Connexion, Canonical, ImpiLinux, Obsidian and even Microsoft representatives in attendance at the September 16 briefing.
Although the agency has been silent on the likely value of the tender, Sita GM Sidwell Ngqandu told Tectonic last month that he expects a 20% to 30% uptake of open source software in government over the next four years, adding up to a potentially valuable late Christmas present for those who make the grade.
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Microsoft Ends Era Of Closed File Formats
Posted by: DanieVDM on Friday, June 03, 2005 - 09:20 AM EET
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4701 Reads
From http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/06/02/1231253&tid=109&tid=95&tid=1
RzUpAnmsCwrds writes "According to an MSDN Channel 9 interview with an Office file-format developer, the next version of Microsoft Office (Office 12) will default to newly-developed XML file formats in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. The new formats will apparently include XML files along with other files (images, etc) inside of a Zip file. Microsoft will also be providing extensive documentation of the new format to the public through MSDN. The developer likewise announced that Microsoft would be releasing updates for Office 2000, XP, and 2003 to read and write the new formats when the new version of Office is released. If this interview is correct, it could mean the beginning of the end of Microsoft's proprietary file formats." Coverage at Beta News, Information Week, and the Washington Post.
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Why Open Source Software?
Posted by: DanieVDM on Friday, June 03, 2005 - 09:18 AM EET
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4446 Reads
This paper provides quantitative data that, in many cases, using open source software / free software (abbreviated as OSS/FS, FLOSS, or FOSS) is a reasonable or even superior approach to using their proprietary competition according to various measures. This paper’s goal is to show that you should consider using OSS/FS when acquiring software. This paper examines market share, reliability, performance, scalability, security, and total cost of ownership. It also has sections on non-quantitative issues, unnecessary fears, OSS/FS on the desktop, usage reports, governments and OSS/FS, other sites providing related information, and ends with some conclusions.
http://www.dwheeler.com/oss_fs_why.html
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