Those dumb South Africans don’t just get it seems to be Microsoft’s senior director of interoperability’s Jason Matusow message in his blog posting of May 19th.

The South African Bureau of Standards (SABS) on Friday approved the Open Document Format (ODF) as an official national South African standard. The adoption of ODF by South Africa opens the way for the businesses and government to adopt ODF more widely in their processes. ODF is already an international standard, approved by the International Standards Organisation, or ISO.

Microsoft's plans of having its OOXML document format accepted as a national standard were thwarted by the South African Bureau of Standards in a conclusive vote against the move in a meeting yesterday.

"There is no question that all over the world the competing interests in the Open XML standardization process are going to use all tactics available to them within the rules." - Microsoft's Director of Corporate Standards Jason Matusow. Well, you have to hand it to Microsoft. They are nothing if not thorough, and leave as little to chance as possible.

Open standards are critical in ensuring that the South African government both avoids vendor lock-in and promotes democracy. This is according to South Africa’s minister of home affairs, Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula.

In the wake of the release of the South African government's Minimum Interoperability Standards (MIOS) for information systems document, Tectonic asked Microsoft SA's platform strategy manager, Paulo Ferreira how this would impact on the company and its drives to promote the Office Open XML (OOXML) format.

Whenever I write about Microsoft here I usually get a few comments asking me, with varying degrees of politeness, why I am wasting electrons on this subject on a site devoted to GNU/Linux. The reason I do this – and why I am about to do it again – is that whether we like it or not, Microsoft remains probably the single most important external factor in the free software world.

Despite a national open source strategy and a well-publicised set of minimum interoperability standards for government, the South African education department has launched a teacher laptop project that excludes free and open source software (FOSS).

I really, really don't understand this. I understand that Microsoft has a history of aggression against open source, as Chris DiBona wrote recently on the Open Source Initiative's (OSI) license-discuss e-mail list. I compete with Microsoft and have for many years. I get that Microsoft has been bad.