Software Freedom International, the worldwide organizer of the annual Software Freedom Day, encourages all SFD teams to support the Document Freedom Day 2009 (DFD 2009) celebration (http://documentfreedom.org/) on 25 March 2009. DFD 2009 aims to raise awareness on the importance of accessible document formats and open standards in everyone's day to day activities.

Open standards are agreed document definitions which are available to the public to review and use. They cannot depend on formats or protocols that are not open standards themselves. The definitions of these open standards are free from legal and technical restrictions that limit their use, and can be easily implemented in multiple environments - so they can be used on PCs, iPods, Playstations and whatever computing environments we'll be using in 50 years time.

Open standards protect governments, businesses and the wider community of computer users from vendor and data lock-ins. Such lock-ins obstruct users from exercising their full freedom in software and the information they access. Computers have only become part of daily life in the last twenty or thirty years, and yet already there are documents that, due to closed formats, we are unable to easily access using modern software.

Software freedom will not be complete without open standards and open document formats. Together, they ensure that free and open source software can be created and developed to implement open standards to benefit millions of users worldwide.

The Software Freedom Day and Document Freedom Day teams are united in advancing information and software freedom for everyone. Find out where your closest DFD 2009 team is by visiting the website (http://documentfreedom.org/) - and if there isn't one, why not plan your own event?

REFERENCE:
Rick Bahague
rick@cp-union.com
Publicity officer, Software Freedom International