Approve OpenDocument as OASIS Standard

At the head of this week, OASIS, the international e-business standards consortium, annouced formally that member approved the Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) v1.0 as an OASIS Standard.

This news had already Slashdoted in 4th May, but in Japan there are a few articles proviced by IT-oriented online news media such as IT media, Japan Internet.com and Nikkei IT PRO. Some blogs such as Placebo Effect also touch the story.

Most of Japanese market leaders seems not to understand the meaning of this news.

I'm now working for makeing guidelines of a government software/hardware procurement.
We had discussed and decided that government should make effort to procure a standard-based technology. It means if Linux have become an international standard, Gov. might make a RFP which refer that standard.
The situation may be same on the document format side. Now Open Document format becomes Defacto standard refferd with authority as same as SGML, XML and HTML.
So Gov. will refer it in RFPs.

This is exactly a BIG thing for not only software vendors and system integrator, but OSS community, I think.

I have a plan to present at Linux World Expo/Tokyo 2005 which titled as 'OSS and Standard' in Jun, 3rd, 2005.
I want to talk about such a procurement effect.