Document freedom : what is it and why is it important
Paper. Paper has been with us for thousands of years. With paper, once you learnt how to read a language, you could read any document.We are now entering the age of electronics. This is a world where most new documents are electronic in form. You cannot read them directly, they are machine readable only and we need hardware and software to do so.
Because we are still at the beginning of this era , we see many and very rapid changes. There are changes in the hardware, in the media and in the form or format of the documents. Even fairly recent documents are at risk of being inaccessible due to changes in technology, for example 5inch floppies are recently used but now difficult to access.
The problem arises when you become dependent on a particular vendor to read a document. Should you need/have to buy a particular machine or licence from a particular vendor to read your phone bill or to file your income tax return?
No.
We must be free to use any software we want (including software that we have written ourselves) to handle our documents . This is a basic economic freedom. Any restriction on this is a tax on us and as good Pakistanis we all know that we should avoid taxes :-)
If your vendor needs to increase sales they will release a new incompatible version of their product. For example MS Word 2007 produces documents that are unreadable in MS Word 2000.
If the vendor of your proprietary software decides to discontinue support for their proprietary formats then your documents soon become unusable, unaccesible. This is why truly OPEN standards are important now. This is why we support the use of ODF and the aims of the ODF Alliance
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26 April 2008 is Document Freedom Day
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