I got the following published in the ST on August 10th – albeit their online edition.

Aug 10, 2006
Govt should revisit issue of using Open Document Format to sharpen competitiveness

I refer to the letters in the Forum page in April and May urging the Singapore government to adopt the Open Document Format (now the ISO 26300 standard) as the official format for all government agencies and the private sector, and move away from proprietary document formats.

These suggestions were dismissed outright by the Infocomm Development Authority. It is now time to revisit this issue.

This week, Malaysia became the latest country to officially adopt ODF as a national standard. The following press release at the ODF Alliance has the details:

Click to access ianceRelease27July06.pdf

It is still not too late. As we observe the silver anniversary of IT in Singapore and look forward to the visions of IN2015, the rapid adoption and roll out, through the National IT Standards Committee, of ODF as a Singapore Standard can help increase and sharpen Singapore’s competitiveness.

Harish Pillay
President, Linux Users’ Group (Singapore)