ODF becomes a government standard in South Africa – will they stop the OOXML patent as well ?

As most of you know, I’m not a huge fan of politicians. My recent letter to our beloved Minister of Health being a case in point. The reality is that politics require nothing more than ambition, greed and a certain amount of people skills (specifically: how to manipulate them) to succeed in. While actual skill in any other field is a kind of optional extra. Frankly, anybody who is good at their job, is almost certainly not in politics.
I’m digressing, Douglas Adams said it far more succinctly: anybody who is capable of getting themselves made president should under no account be allowed to do the job.

So I am always pleasantly surprised when a politician (here or anywhere) actually does something, rather than just talking about what they are going to do. The moreso when for a change, the entire government gets something right (probably meaning one or two people on ground-level actually figured it out and had some clout).
Well today is such a day. For a long time the [tag]South Africa[/tag]n government has talked about the virtues of open source, but nothing really concrete ever happened – a lot of positive talk, no real action. Now the very existence of that positive talk is largely due to the existence of the State IT Agency (sita) and the CSIR. Both full of smart people – who have a fairly major advisory position with the government. But just about every time we made a positive move (mandating that government agencies have to look for alternatives – including OSS before buying software) – microsoft gave us a nice big gift of some free windows licenses and nobody did much. Interesting that our very liberal government has consistently use the word ‘open-source’ rather than ‘free software’. I thought they were the government of the freedom fighters ?

Today we saw something actually happen for a change: The government has adopted [tag]ODF[/tag] as an official standard for [tag]government[/tag] [tag]communications[/tag]. Meaning in future, all government comms must use this format (in a very rough nutshell).
Now this is an interesting approach, open standards aren’t good enough and I will argue all who claim they are – we need free software, but they are a big step in the right direction.
Now the only real question is whether the government is serious enough about this to change our ridiculous patent law before it makes ODF effectively illegal to use. See, in SA [tag]software patents[/tag] are not legal. But our system basically grants all [tag]patent[/tag] requests with no investigation for legality (how stupid is that ?) – unless they are challenged. So microsoft tried to patent xml-based document storage here (something with massive amounts of prior art even if it was legal to patent software) – and got it granted. Thanks to [tag]Bob Jolife[/tag] and his team of dedicated volunteers – it is being challenged, but that is proving to be a costly and painful legal exercise.
Apparently the government does not believe that before granting somebody a monopoly on a technology it should at least make sure that the technology complies with the requirements for that monopoly (is of a patentable form, is truly new, is non-obvious etc.).

So the question I put to the government is: Will you protect your newly standardized format from being illegally destroyed by an unconstitutional patent now that you have a vested interest in it ? Will you reform our patent system to include a check-before-grant mechanism of some kind (the ideal being peer-review by others in the same  industry) ?