26th
Document Freedom Day
This from http://www.oss.gov.za
The Document Freedom Day (DFD) is a global day of celebration which is supported by a group of organisations and companies, including, but not limited to the Free Software Foundation Europe, ODF Alliance, OpenForum Europe, IBM, Red Hat and Sun Microsystems, Inc.
“We’re proud to support this global effort to encourage open and inclusive information exchange,” said Marino Marcich, Managing Director, OpenDocument Format Alliance on the documentfreedom.org website. “Document freedom means creating, exchanging, and preserving your electronic documents without having to buy software from a particular vendor.”
ODF, or the opendocument format, is a file format for representing word-processor, spreadsheet and presentation files. It is an ISO standard (ISO/IEC 26300:2006) which has received enthusiastic support from vendors and governments worldwide. In the past year Malaysia, Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, Germany, Brazil, South Africa and a host of others have all given ODF the thumbs up as a medium for interoperable document exchange. The format has been developed through an open, collaborative process and is freely available to implementors world-wide.
It is appropriate to be able to announce on this day that you will soon be able to send ODF files to any government department. In line with the open standards policy of government, all government departments should be able to read ODF files by the 1 April. We are also eagerly awaiting the publication of the ODF format as a new South African national standard, SANS26300. Publication is due around the middle of April.
Currently there are a number of ways of creating and working with ODF files. The vast majority of which are available at no cost. Probably the most popular way on Microsoft Windows is to download one of the freely available open source office suites such as OpenOffice from http://www.openoffice,org. If you have Gnu/Linux then OpenOffice will normally be installed by default. Alternatives include using the online Google Docs at http://docs.google.com. There are a number of others which are being actively developed including IBM Lotus Symphony and a variety of plugins for Microsoft Office.
“An open, unhindered exchange of information in all areas of life is of fundamental importance for today’s knowledge-based society. It is an important foundation for our shared objective: a peaceful, democratic, pluralistic society. The Open Document Format, as a completely open and ISOstandardized format, is an excellent vehicle for the free exchange of knowledge and information in the globalized age.”
German Federal Minister for Foreign Affairs,
Dr Frank-Walter Steinmeier
