Today is DFD ‘09, global day for document liberation
A great global community is gathering today to celebrate the second Document Freedom Day. After a successful 2008 celebration, Document Freedom Day teams all over the world are joining efforts 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.
"We are happy to see our community getting bigger this year", says Ivan Jelic, DFD Coordinator. "We expect large variety of activities organized by DFD teams, from speeches and informative events, to university document liberation or open standard promotion in local governments."
"Like all Open Standards, Document Freedom provides users with the freedom to choose their application freely, and yet still be able to communicate and collaborate with others.", explains Georg Greve, president of FSFE. "This freedom of choice provides the basis for competition in the field of text processing software. Where there is healthy competition, companies and software developers are driven to innovate, and monopoly pricing becomes impossible. So Document Freedom means better software and lower cost. Document Freedom also means that yesterday’s documents can easily be read with tomorrow’s software, protecting and preserving your data against forced vendor incompatibilities through the upgrade treadmill."
The DFD team will do its best to gather all the information about this year activities, organize them and publish on DFD web pages. If you have material about local document liberation activities, please send mail to: contact AT documentfreedom.org
How you can get active
The Document Freedom Day is a collaborative effort.
You can make a difference by linking to http://documentfreedom.org, generate your own artworks or use the ones available at http://documentfreedom.org/Artwork.
You could also print out some of the DFD leaflets at http://www.documentfreedom.org/Artwork#Leaflet and give them to your co-workers, family or friends. And if you feel creative, consider taking pictures or small video testimonials that show the world what Document Freedom means to you!
About the Document Freedom Day
The Document Freedom Day (DFD) is a global day for Document Liberation with roughly 250 active teams worldwide. It is a day of grassroots effort around the world to promote and build awareness for the relevance of Free Document Formats in particular and Open Standards in general.
Document Freedom Day is supported by a large group of organizations and individuals, including, but not limited to ANSOL, Ars Aperta, BrOffice.org, COSS, Esoma, Estándares Abiertos, FFII, Free Knowledge Foundation, Free Software Foundation, Free Software Foundation Europe, Free Software Foundation Latin America, Funambol, Google, IBM, NLnet, ODF Alliance, Open Forum Europe, Open Source Initiative (OSI), Opentia, OSL, iMatix, Red Hat, Sun, The Open Learning Centre.
The list of DFD Teams is available at: http://documentfreedom.org/Category:Teams
About the Free Software Foundation Europe
The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) is a non-profit non-governmental organization active in many European countries and involved in many global activities. Access to software determines participation in a digital society. To secure equal participation in the information age, as well as freedom of competition, the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) pursues and is dedicated to the furthering of Free Software, defined by the freedoms to use, study, modify and copy. Founded in 2001, creating awareness for these issues, securing Free Software politically and legally, and giving people Freedom by supporting development of Free Software are central issues of the FSFE.