Document Freedom Day

Celebrating information accessibility and raising awareness of Open Standards

Open Standards and why they matter

Open Standards are essential for interoperability and freedom of choice based on the merits of different software applications. They provide freedom from data lock-in and the subsequent vendor lock-in. This makes Open Standards essential for governments, companies, organizations and individual users of information technology.

Visible effects of Open Standards are that you can:

• Choose any operating system or application and still be able to read and edit all your old documents.
• Collaborate with others regardless of which software they are using.
• Use any software of your choice to interact with businesses, the government, and others.

Definition

For the purpose of Document Freedom Day, the working understanding of "Open Standards" is that the standard be:

• subject to full public assessment and use without constraints in a manner equally available to all parties;
• without any components or extensions that have dependencies on formats or protocols that do not meet the definition of an Open Standard themselves;
• free from legal or technical clauses that limit its utilization by any party or in any business model;
• managed and further developed independently of any single vendor in a process open to the equal participation of competitors and third parties;
• available in multiple complete implementations by competing vendors, or as a complete implementation equally available to all parties.

What can you do?

• Reject the creeping domination of computer desktops by a single language forcing people tolearn a foreign language before they can express themselves electro
• Reject the ownership of office productivity tools by monopoly suppliers which imposes a de-facto tax on global electronic free speech and penalizes the economically disadvantaged.
• nically.
• Reject the ownership of file formats by proprietary software companies - documents belong to their creators, not software vendors.
• Reject a closed software development process where errors can lie hidden and poor quality is accepted.
• All this can be easily done by using LibreOffice 3.0

for free from the Document Foundation

.

Download Libre office it now, and get your freedom back!