1 out of 365: happy document freedom day
Today is Document Freedom Day: Roughly 200 teams from more than 60 countries worldwide are organising local activities to raise awareness for Document Freedom and Open Standards.
In a world where records are increasingly kept in electronic form, Open Standards are crucial for valuable information to outlive the application in which it was initially generated. The question of Document Freedom has severe repercussions for freedom of choice, competition, markets and the sovereignty of countries and their governments.
Belgium has become the first country to mandate the use of the OpenDocument format (ODF) for office files. From September 2007 software in all Belgian government departments must be able to read ODF files. If the experiment is successful, ODF will become the standard interchange format - although departments will still be able to exchange office files in proprietary formats internally.
What should you do ?
So, What are you going to do ? How important is your content ? Do you think a company should be able to decide if, or rather for how much, your own content could be read and worked on ?
Start using Open Document Format (ODF). It is supported by many applications, some of them proprietary, some of them Free Software. The following applications are Free Software and available for public download. Try ODF today:
Use the only document standard
ODF(OpenDocument Format) an ISO standard created with the aim to provide an open XML-based document file format for office applications to be used for documents containing text, spreadsheets, charts, and graphical elements. ODF is defined via an open and transparent process at OASIS and has been approved unanimously by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) as an international standard in May 2006. Instead of trying to reinvent the wheel ODF reuses established standards like HTML, SVG, XSL, SMIL, XLink, XForms, MathML, and Dublin Core.
ODF leaves space for all present and future vendors do implement it and makes sure that end users won't suffer from any sort of vendor lock-in. In contrast to earlier used binary formats which were cryptic and difficult to process, ODF's use of XML makes accessing the document content simple.
ODF guarantees long-term viability. The OASIS ODF TC, the OASIS ODF Adoption TC, and the ODF Alliance include members from Adobe, BBC, EDS, EMC, GNOME, Google, IBM, Intel, KDE, Novell, Oracle, Red Hat, Software AG and Sun Microsystems. Since June 2006 the ODF Alliance has already more than 300 members.
By contrast, Microsoft office formats are "de-facto" standard, and so far, the standardisation bodies have rejected its format as a valid standard (lots of very technical issues).
Thanks, happy document freedom day.
