Open Standards

  • ODF recommended for Galicia’s public sector

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Politics, Tech

    Galicia's coat of armsJoinup, the EU’s public sector open source news website, reports that the government of Spain’s autonomous region of Galicia is recommending that the region’s public sector organisations adopt Open Document Format (ODF, ISO 26300) for editable electronic documents and PDF for non-editable electronic documents.

    “This will facilitate the re-use of documents and the creation of derivative works”, the government writes in a guide which was published on 26 March, Document Freedom Day (posts passim). Public sector bodies are also being advised to make their documents available using a copyleft licence, such as Creative Commons’ CC-by-SA.

    The guide ‘Boas prácticas para a liberación de publicacións da Xunta de Galicia‘ (Good Practice Guide for liberating Galicia government documents) has been written by Galicia’s free software resource centre, the ‘Oficina de Coordinación de Software Libre’ (Ocfloss). The report is available in both ODT and PDF formats is also published under the CC-by-SA licence.

    The guide also contains advice for the public sector on how to manage intellectual property rights in respect of its documents, images and multimedia files, as well as guidance on the creation of derivative works.

  • Introducing the Document Liberation Project

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Tech

    DLP logoThe Document Foundation blog today announced the birth of the Document Liberation Project, a home for the growing community of developers united to free users from vendor lock-in of contents. Together, these hackers will offer a solution to the routine problem faced by many computer users who have their personal digital contents stored in an old, outdated and inaccessible file format.

    A routine problem encountered by computer users today is the discovery of personal digital content created years ago and stored in old, outdated file formats. These old files often cannot be opened by any application on the user’s current operating system. The users are quite simply locked out of their own content. The most common reason for this inability to access old data is the use of proprietary file formats that result in vendor lock-in.

    The Document Liberation Project has been created in the hope that it would enable individuals, organisations and governments to recover their data from proprietary formats and provide a mechanism to convert that data into open file formats, returning effective control of the content from software companies to the actual authors.

    The Document Liberation Project believes:

    • documents and their content belong to their creators, not software vendors;
    • that access to content you own should not be hindered by the fact that the application that created it is not maintained any more or that the application does not work on the particular operating system that you use;
    • that use of truly open and free standards for encoding digital content is the only long-term guarantee that a user’s digital content will never be beholden to a single vendor;
    • that implementation of free and open source software that can read proprietary file formats is the best solution to escape vendor lock-in during the transition period to truly open and free standards.

    Its mission is as follows:

    • to try to understand the structure and details of undocumented proprietary file formats;
    • to use that understanding of the file formats to implement libraries that are able to parse such documents and extract as much information as possible from them;
    • to use our existing framework to encode this data in a truly free and open standard file format: Open Document Format.

    Developers have so far provided read support for proprietary file formats including MS Visio, CorelDraw, MS Publisher, Apple Keynote and a handful of different old Macintosh formats. In addition to LibreOffice, import libraries for these file formats are used by Abiword, Calligra, CorelDRAW File Viewer, Inkscape and Scribus.

  • Call for proposals to improve major LibreOffice/OpenOffice features

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Tech

    The Office Interoperability Working Group of the Open Source Business Alliance has called for proposals to improve major features in LibreOffice and OpenOffice suites.

    OSB logoAs announced in September 2013, the OSB Alliance’s Office Interoperability Working Group has held a requirements engineering workshop in Stuttgart. OSB Alliance members Munich city council, Leipzig city council, Jena city council, the Swiss Federal Court, and the Swiss Federal IT Steering Unit FITSU defined commonly required improvements for the open source LibreOffice and OpenOffice suites. Other public authorities will providing supporting funding.

    A new specification entitled “Major Feature Improvements for LibreOffice/Apache OpenOffice” (PDF) has been developed recently on the basis of the Stuttgart workshop. It proposes six major improvements, as follows:

    1. Improve mail merge in Writer;
    2. Improve paragraph handling in Writer;
    3. Implement styles in all content elements of Writer;
    4. Add chart styles in Calc;
    5. Make more functions available in shared spreadsheets in Calc;
    6. Develop a change tracking specification for the ODF standard.

    ODF file iconOne important feature of today’s office suites is change tracking within documents: both LibreOffice and OpenOffice offer change tracking in ODF files. However, Microsoft Office has not implemented change tracking for ODF, stating that the current change tracking specification within the ODF standard is insufficiently defined. The last of the above requirements therefore covers the exact specification of change tracking within the ODF standard to enable Microsoft to implement it in future versions of Microsoft Office.

    Open source providers are now invited to submit offers to cover one or more of these requirements. The detailed requirements, general conditions and tendering procedure are described in the specification document. All proposals need to be submitted until 30 April 2014 to the working group’s spokesman, Dr. Matthias Stürmer (email: stuermer (at) osb-alliance.com).

  • Today is DFD 2014

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Politics, Tech

    logo for Document Freedom Day 2014Today is Document Freedom Day (DFD) 2014. DFD is an annual celebration of and opportunity to promote the use of open formats and standards for digital documents and takes place on the last Wednesday in March each year.

    Document freedom means documents that are free can be used in any way that the author intends. They can be read, transmitted, edited, and transformed using a variety of tools.

    Open standards are formats which everybody can use free of charge and restriction. They come with compatibility “built-in” – the way they work is shared publicly and any organisation or person can use them in their products and services without asking for permission. Open Standards are the foundation of co-operation and modern society.

    However, don’t just take my word for it.

    Below are some testimonials for open standards and document freedom from people with a bit more influence than your ‘umble scribe.

    Neelie Kroes, Vice-President, European Commission

    I know a smart business decision when I see one – choosing open standards is a very smart business decision indeed.

    Stephen Fry, actor, screenwriter, author, playwright, journalist, poet, comedian, television presenter and film director

    Open standards make sense. What makes no sense is that large companies in the field still do not understand this. It is time once and for all to end the pointless nonsense of one document sent on one platform being incomprehensible to the user of another.

    Chris DiBona, Open Source Manager, Google

    Over time, files that have been saved in closed formats tend to be less and less accessible to their creators. We prefer people to use modern and truly open formats like ODF whenever possible to ensure that they can continue to access and enjoy their work today and into the far future.

    Happy DFD 2014!

  • Canary Islands government to adopt OpenOffice

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Politics, Tech

    The autonomous government of Spain’s Canary Islands has announced in a press release (Spanish) that the Directorate General of Telecommunications and New Technologies has proposed that the free and open source OpenOffice 4.0 office suite be adopted by the government of the islands as its corporate office productivity software.

    screenshot of OpenOffice splash screen

    At the same time it also announced a standard for web site content management systems to be preferred by all Canary Islands government departments. It decided on “Portal web Tipo”, a package built in-house as part of the islands’ Platino e-government services platform. Platino and its components are being made available as open source to other Spanish public sector organisations via the CTT (Centro de Transferencia de Tecnología – Technology Transfer Centre) software repository.

  • 2 weeks to Document Freedom Day

    Steve WoodsOpen Standards, Tech

    logo for Document Freedom Day 2014Document Freedom Day is a day for celebrating and raising awareness of open standards and formats; it takes place on the last Wednesday in March each year. On this day people who believe in fair access to communications technology teach, perform and demonstrate.

    Document freedom means documents that are free can be used in any way that the author intends. They can be read, transmitted, edited, and transformed using a variety of tools. Documents that aren’t free – like Microsoft Office’s .docx, .xlsx, .pptx, etc. – are locked to some particular software or company. Their author cannot choose how to use them because they are controlled by technical restrictions. This is akin to having a racehorse and never letting get above a trot.

    However, document freedom is about more than spreadsheets, presentations and word processing documents. Document freedom embraces all forms of data, including artwork, sheet and recorded music, emails and statistics. These can all be stored in ways which empower users, but they can also be stored in formats which constrain and manipulate us at enormous cost.

    Open standards are formats which everybody can use free of charge and restriction. They come with compatibility “built-in” – the way they work is shared publicly and any organisation can use them in their products and services without asking for permission. Open Standards are the foundation of cooperation and modern society. Today we celebrate the 25th anniversary of the world wide web – a vital resource that relies on open standards to work. Read more on open standards.

    You can get involved in Document Freedom Day by organising local activities, distributing fliers, adding a banner on your blog, donating money, and much more. See the Document Freedom Day site for more ideas and information.

  • Cabinet Office’s open standards consultation extended

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Politics, Tech

    Cabinet Office logoThe Cabinet Office’s consultation on open standards for document exchange with government departments (posts passim), which was due to end yesterday, 26th February 2014, has now been extended until 5.00 pm on Friday, 28th February 2014.

    According to a Cabinet Office spokesman, the reason for the extension is as follows:

    This is because the Standards Hub server went down last night at about 10pm, as a result of which some people were unable to submit their comments to the proposals.

    The file formats being proposed as standards by the Cabinet Office are:

    • HTML (4.01 or higher, e.g. HTML5);
    • ODF 1.1 (or higher, e.g. ODF 1.2);
    • Plain text (TXT); and
    • Comma-separated values (CSV).

    So far it would appear that most respondents to the consultation are supporting this welcome move to openness by the UK government and Microsoft’s shills are thin on the ground.

    Comment on the consultation.

  • My comments to HMG on open formats

    Steve WoodsOpen Standards, Politics, Tech

    ODF file iconIt may have escaped the notice of most of the country, but the Cabinet Office is currently consulting on the use of open formats, e.g. ODF, HTML, TXT and CSV, for documents when sharing them or collaborating with government on them.

    As an ardent supporter of open standards and open formats, I decided it was my civic duty to support the Cabinet Office’s welcome move to openness, all the more so as Microsoft was asking its pals in an open letter (in closed .docx format. Ed.) to try and water down the move to ODF by having its OOXML format adopted as well.

    My comments on the government’s proposals were as follows:

    I too welcome and wholeheartedly support the move to open standards and file formats and away from vendor lock-in and proprietary file formats, access to which is solely at the whim of software vendors. No single company should have a monopoly on the formats used for official documents and documents of record.

    In particular, I welcome the move to Open Document Format. I have been using ODF for many years in my role as company secretary of an IT co-operative and we have the satisfaction that our successors and future historians will be able to read our online and offline records without accessibility to our records being at the whim of a software supplier with a quasi-monopoly on office productivity products.

    Furthermore, I would advise against any use of OOXML (also known as Office Open XML), which is not a truly open standard and hasn’t even been implemented properly by the company that created it.

    I trust that you will implement open documents standards with all speed, after which you then need to tell other bodies, such as schools, local authorities, the community and voluntary sectors, that there are viable alternatives to proprietary file formats.

    Another thought: in the UK there are various timescales – 30, 50 & 100 years – for the release of documents to the public. This implies that whatever the format, we will still need to be able to read them 100 years from now. There is no reason to suppose that Microsoft will be around then, so using a proprietary format as a standard must surely be an unacceptable risk for the readability of public documents.

    If you wish to support the move to open standards and formats by HM Government, you have one day left as the consultation closes tomorrow.

  • Rent your freedom

    Steve WoodsOpen Standards, Tech

    Anyone who uses MS Office will know that .docx (otherwise known as Microsoft Word Office Open XML Format. Ed.) is a file format used by MS Word.

    As a proprietary file format, there’s always a risk of vendor-lock-in with .docx and its fellow Office file formats.

    That said, this vehicle rental firm has an most apposite slogan on its vehicles, particularly as Microsoft has now moved MS Office onto subscription licensing with MS Office 365.

    image of van bearing wording DOCX Rental, Rent Your Freedom

    To avoid renting freedom where your data is concerned, this blog recommends using free and open document formats, like Open Document Format (ODF).

    Next month sees Document Freedom Day 2014 (DFD) being held on 26th. DFD’s aims are to promote information accessibility and raise awareness of open standards. More details and resources are available on the DFD website.

    Hat tip: FSFE

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