Document Freedom Day is a day for celebrating and raising awareness of Open Standards and formats which takes place on the last Wednesday in March each year. On this day people who believe in fair access to communications technology teach, perform, and demonstrate. Document Freedom is about all forms of data, including artwork, sheet and recorded music, emails, and statistics.
Read more »Document Freedom Day, March 27th, 2013
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Finally: UK Open Standards are Royalty-free, not FRAND
In a huge win for open standards, free and open source software and the public, the long-awaited UK government definition of open standards has come down firmly on the side of royalty-free, not FRAND. The UK government list seven principles as defining an open standard.
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1&1 Internet AG receives German Document Freedom Award
1&1, GMX and WEB.DE receive the German Document Freedom Award for the use of Open Standards. The prize is awarded by the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) and the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure e.V. (FFII). 1&1 is awarded for automatically adding XMPP for all customers of their mail services.
Read more »Open Document Standards Mandatory in Hungarian Government
Hungary's public administrations will by default use open document standards for their electronic documents, as of April this year, the government ministers agreed on 23 December, and all public organisations are encouraged to move to open source office tools. Hungary's government also in December decided to cancel the funding of proprietary office suite licences for all schools.
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Puglia region council to approve open source and standards law
The council of the Italian region of Puglia is about to approve the law proposed last December that will make the use of open source and open standards mandatory for the region's public administrations, according to news reports.
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Fellowship interview with Florian Effenberger
Florian Effenberger has been a Free Software evangelist for many years. Pro bono, he is founding member and part of the Steering Committee at The Document Foundation. He has previously been active in the OpenOffice.org project for seven years, most recently as Marketing Project Lead.
Read more »Fellowship interview with Dan Leinir
Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen, when not solving interoperability problems between Open Document Format (ODF) editors at KO GmbH, spends his time developing GamingFreedom.org: a gaming orientated social network which promotes Free culture, and Gluon: a full featured modern game engine, based on the Qt framework.
Read more »UK finally moves on Open Standards
When it comes to Free Software and Open Standards, the UK has long lagged way behind other countries. There were a few policies that sounded good on paper, but that’s exactly where they stayed. This may be finally changing. The UK Cabinet Office has issued a "procurement policy notice" (.pdf) that is, well, surprising. In a good way.
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Freedom to compete: Fixing EU's software procurement
We would like to see the European Commission back up its public rhetoric regarding Free Software, Open Standards and interoperability with its own actions. This would require DIGIT to rethink some procurement practices in order to open up public software procurement to competition.
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Why Free Software Matters (2004)
Sean Cohen's piece on ownership of software and vendor lock-in and other important things.
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Battling the Hydra: FSFE’s work on Open Standards
The European Interoperability Framework is just one battle among many. Besides the topic of interoperability in the public sector, there’s the task of reforming standardisation systems so that they produce Open Standards, and educating policy makers about the importance of the issue.
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FSFE refutes BSA's false claims to European Commission
The Business Software Alliance (BSA) is pressuring the European Commission to remove the last vestiges of support for Open Standards from the latest version of the EU's interoperability recommendations, the European Interoperability Framework. FSFE has obtained a copy of a letter sent to the Commission by the BSA last week.
Read more »FSFE refutes BSA's false claims to European Commission
FSFE has obtained a copy of a letter sent to the Commission by the BSA last week. In the following paragraphs they analyse the BSA's arguments and explain why their claims are false, and why Open Standards are key to interoperability and competition in the European software market.
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Estonian Government publishes open source policy
Estonia plans to recommend use of the EUPL for code developed or funded by Estonian public administrations and plans to create a software forge for this software.
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The Recipe for Open Standards (and Why ISO Can’t Cook)
First some definitions. In this post let’s define an “open standard” as one that is: 1) freely available, 2) developed in an open process and 3) freely implementable, e.g., is royalty free. I freely acknowledge that there are interests out there that attempt to soften these criteria, but that only demonstrates the competitive power presented by truly open standards.
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