Letting Open Standards drive Openness and Sustainability

It's been over a year since the announcement that the South African Bureax of Standards (SABS) had adopted the Open Document Format (ODF) as an official national South African standard.
It's expected that the South African government will have ODF as the default document format by 2009. To all of them, I applaud.

The debate and controversy over Microsoft's involvement in OOXML adoption as an ISO standard in 2008 is still a hot topic. Organizations and government departments such as one in the United Kingdom are still trying to makes sense of it to make decisions in support of their long term strategy.

The community warns that products which implement open standards while at the same time introduce proprietary extensions that implement functionality outside of those open standards, are doing nothing to support interoperability.

The discussion around the merit of adopting pure open standards is clear. The questions about the worth that organizations place on their data, information and knowledge have to be considered. What sort of life-sentence is being placed on knowledge buried in proprietary coffins that have no hope of excavation in decades to come?

Technology Thought Leaders at educational institutions will no doubt see this as an opportunity to lead toward openness in support of the fundamental concepts of knowledge sharing and sustainable learning.