MIMO, the French inter-ministerial group devoted to the promotion of open source within government, has become a member of the Advisory Board of The Document Foundation, which produces the free and open source LibreOffice productivity suite, Numerama reports.
MIMO, which was set up in 2005 by ADAE to facilitate the adoption of OpenOffice and then LibreOffice by civil servants, is thus becoming one of the 10 members of the Advisory Board with Google, Intel, Lanedo, Red Hat, SUSE, Freies Office Deutschland e.V., Software in the Public Interest (SPI), the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST).
The Document Foundation’s Advisory Board has no decision-making function within the Documentation Foundation, but has been established to represent the project’s major donors. It makes its recommendations to the Foundation’s Board, which makes the final decisions on the direction of LibreOffice. However, since its members support the project financially to the tune of $5,000-20,000 per year, the opinion of the Advisory Board does receive special attention.
At present MIMO brings together the Ministries of Agriculture, Culture, Defence, the Economy, Ecology, Education, Finance, the Interior and Justice. Several public sector organisations have also joined the group, including CAF, DILA, ENA and the National Assembly. In total, 500,000 workstations have been equipped with free and open source office suites distributed by MIMO.