Tag Archives: Freedom
A personal “Welcome!” to another community-driven organization
It is a big day for the Open Standards and Free Software movement. The community behind OpenOffice.org, decided today to announce the Document Foundation, a community driven organization.
I remember talking to friends, a few months ago, wondering about the future of Open Office. I stated then that OpenOffice.org would have a future when it will be completely open to the community and owned by a community-driven, independent organization. I can’t describe the excitement I have today.
I’ve been an OpenOffice.org user for years, despite the critics it received during for long (whether it’s slow, it crashes, than it less usable than other office suites etc.) But I continued to use it because of ethical and moral reasons (the same reasons that made me believe in Mozilla Firefox, Thunderbird, Fedora Linux and other community-driven projects).
But this is something more than software, it is about the way we share and own our information, about the way we use technology and build it to serve the civil society. Documents, as other formats (video, audio and web standards) are key elements in our lives, assuming that through them people share, create and innovate.
A few years ago, when a community decided to create what is now Mozilla Foundation in order to support the Mozilla project (whose I am a proudly contributor), nobody realized how this would change the web and the way that millions of people are using it. In the same year, Red Hat (probably one of the most known businesses in Free Software) launched the community-driven project Fedora Core, which actually contributed to make desktop/server GNU/Linux what it is today.
Therefore, after many years was followed by other public benefits that have one common mission, let the technology be in control of people (users) and independent of one corporate interest.
Indeed, the technology we have today is thanks to such decisions which comes from people’s desire and based on people’s needs. In fact, that happened many times along history, despite all.
Having the conviction that this day will completely change the picture of document standards and the office software future, I will close by congratulating the founding members for taking this decision (which, probably, will positively affect millions of users in the near future) and wishing the community all the best in the efforts to develop what LibreOffice now is! And long life, Document Foundation!
Approaching open document formats to day-to-day users
I have been involved in a way or another in Document Freedom Day, since the first edition, in 2008. I consider that Open Standards and Open Document Formats are very important for a healthy development of our Digital Society. But, speaking about Open Standards is a tough task. Last year, when planning something for DFD 2009 in Catalonia, I was feeling that all this will never reach the attention of day to day computer users, and unfortunately I was to late to contact the DFD 2009 team and share my opinions with them.
This year, I have been working for 4 months with Free Software Foundation Europe in Berlin, so I shared with them part of my thoughts: we have to move the focus of this campaign from decision-makers to users, extend the vision of what really a document is and make the Open Standards definition understandable.
Below there is a condensed text of my thoughts I wrote to describe better the link of Internet with documents and why we should care about their (open) formats: