CISL and communities strengthen FLOSS office suites

On Friday, July 1, at the International Free Software Forum (FISL) in Porto Alegre - Brazil, the Brazilian Government's Free Software Implementation Committee has signed, along with the communities of the LibreOffice and OpenOffice projects, maintained respectively by the The Document Foundation and Apache Foundation, a Letter of Intent which signals the mutual interest of cooperation with the FLOSS office suites.

The proposal is to strengthen the cooperative position of the Brazilian State with the evolution of the FLOSS office suites, due to its importance within public institutions. The adoption of these tools represents a major success of migrating from proprietary platforms to open source software in all governmental spheres. It's estimated that more than 1 million public computers operate with these solutions, which represents savings on software license fees and national investment in technology.

With that, the government confirms the importance of participating and collaborating in these projects, with an active presence of developers at both communities. This action intent to return to the society and communities the benefits generated to the State, and to support the continuous growth and improvement of these softwares.

The 'Letter of Intent' can be found at http://www.softwarelivre.gov.br/objetivos-do-portal/protocolo-em-ingles.

ODF

The use of FLOSS office suites also reinforces the premise of open standards adoption, recommended by the e-PING (Brazilian federal government interoperability architecture) and the organizations' commitment assumed by the Brasilia Protocol. The Open Document Format (ODF) adoption for storage of governmental information it's important to ensure access to information, regardless of technological platform, and interoperability between governmental agencies.

CISL Communication - July 4, 2011