Happy Document Freedom Day!

Yup, it's today, happy Document Freedom Day! For those that don't know what's this all about, Document Freedom Day is a worldwide event to celebrate and promote Document Freedom and Open Standards. As I put it on the "Testimonials" page,

Open Standards and Document Freedom are not only essential, but its importance is more visible as time passes by. From official documents and government websites to cientific archives or medical records, citizens in the digital era deal - or try to - with digital documents every day. It is crucial not only to ensure that they can easily do so, without obstacles, but also to prevent us from a dark future, by providing the right means of archival of all that information.

ANSOL is going to spend the day doing cool things about the issue, but as always we wanted also to party to everyone interested, so we're organizing a nice dinner party, and you are of course invited! If you're not in Portugal that's no excuse: there are 48 events in 21 different countries: some parties, some educational, but all of them fun! If you think Open Standards are not that important, consider this: in 2004, during the tsunami in the Indian Ocean, the rescue operators of different countries were unable to exchange information about the ongoing operations, because they all used different closed formats of documents. This massively slowed down and complicated the coordination of rescue actions. Lots of human lives were put into danger just because vendors did not care about use of open standards in their products. And this is just one example. So, what are you waiting for? Join us!

Say NO to the Microsoft Office format as an ISO standard

You know Office? Yeah, that tool people use for producting documents, of almost any type: memos, reports, books, spreadsheets, charts, presentations, word processing documents... So, nowadays
we have an Open Standard for such documents: ODF (OpenDocument Format). If you're into this issue, you may already know that Microsoft has their own new format, Office Open XML (OOXML), and they're trying to make it also an ISO standard.

Why is it bad?

1. There is already a standard ISO26300 named Open Document Format (ODF): a dual standard adds costs, uncertainty and confusion to industry, government and citizens;
2. There is no provable implementation of the OOXML specification: Microsoft Office 2007 produces a special version of OOXML, not a file format which complies with the OOXML specification;
3. There is missing information from the specification document, for example how to do a autoSpaceLikeWord95 or useWord97LineBreakRules;
4. More than 10% of the examples mentioned in the proposed standard do not validate as XML;
5. There is no guarantee that anybody can write a software that fully or partially implements the OOXML specification without being liable to patent damages or patent license fees by Microsoft;
6. This standard proposal conflicts with other ISO standards, such as ISO 8601 (Representation of dates and times), ISO 639 (Codes for the Representation of Names and Languages) or ISO/IEC 10118-3 (cryptographic hash);
7. There is a bug in the spreadsheet file format which forbids to enter any date before the year 1900: such bugs affects the OOXML specification as well as software versions such as Microsoft Excel 2000, XP, 2003 or 2007.
8. This standard proposal has not been created by bringing together the experience and expertise of all interested parties (such as the producers, sellers, buyers, users and regulators), but by Microsoft alone.

If you agree with me and also think that these are reasons enough for a rejection of OOXML as a standard, please sign this petition!