The European Union competition commissioner, Neelie Kroes, took a swipe at Microsoft on Tuesday by recommending that businesses and governments use software based on internationally accepted standards.

The Information Economy Report 2008 - Science and technology for development: the new paradigm of ICT, analyses the current and potential contribution of information technology to knowledge creation and diffusion. It explores how ICTs help generate innovations that improve the livelihoods of the poor and support enterprise competitiveness. The report examines how ICTs affect productivity and growth and reflects on the need for a development-oriented approach to intellectual property rights in order to enable effective access to technology.

Open Document format (ODF) yesterday became an official standard for South African government communications.

The ODF standard is included in the government's Mininimum Interoperability Standards for Information Systems in government (MIOS) released yesterday.

While open source software has achieved growing acceptance in the marketplace, open standards are also increasingly seen as key enablers of the transfer and use of information across organizations, systems, and devices. Now an open standard for document formats, ODF, has emerged that promises to deliver greater access, choice and innovation among office suites.

Location(s)

See map: Google Maps