The 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solution to the routine problem faced by many computer users who have their personal digital contents stored in an old, outdated and inaccessible file format.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encountered by computer users today is the discovery of personal digital content created years ago and stored in old, outdated file formats.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.

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

As 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.

One 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).