March 31st 2010 is Document Freedom Day, a “global day for document liberation”. I strongly support the idea of document freedom because this it is the concept that helped bring me into the Free Software fold.
The Past
Two things about documents and computing never made a lot of sense to me: I had to pay some third-party to do business with someone, and that I may or may not be able to retrieve my own data based on the whims of that third-party!
The more I ran into problems on these two points, the more I thought on them and realized there had to be a better way.
At the time though, largely ignorant of the Free Software movement, I could only became frustrated at the ineffecient and stifling world of proprietary software and document formats, jumping through whatever hoops proprietary software houses introduced, throwing time and money at the problem that would have been better spent on just about anything.
The Present
Of course, if you are reading this blog, you already know how the story turns out – and I wouldn’t be surprised if most of you got there before I did!
As part of explaining the ludicrous nature of proprietary software formats to the less technically inclined, I often rely on something like this:
If you were to ask someone what pencil they used to write a memo, they would think “well why does that matter?” But people don’t think anything of asking “What version of Word is that?” It’s silly.
Imagine if you said “Oh, I can’t take Highway 1. I need Highway 1-F because I drive a Ford. And someone else was like and I have to take Highway 1-C because I drive a Chevrolet.” That would be insane.
It’s like a tax that I have to pay to some company to use public resources or something. That’s the sort of thing lack of Freedom causes, you see?
I’d love to get feedback on how to improve this explanation!
Open Standards
I like the idea behind Open Standards — even if they aren’t “superb standards” like OOXML – but much like the term “Open Source”, I think in practice it is easily subverted by commercial interests that do little more than give lip service to the “Open” concept.
I’ve found that when a company insists “Technology X really is Open!” Then you can rest assured Technology X is not really open. Oh! Hi Adobe, didn’t see you standing there.
Fighting the inevitable
I”m always encouraged when I see goverments adopting Open Standards, because I am of the opinion it is inevitable – and I’m always a bit frustrated when I see groups fighting the inevitable.
I think something becomes inevitable when the positive aspects are overwhelming. Consider Marion Marchich’s points in favor of ODF:
- Avoiding lock-in
- Thinking beyond the desktop
- Ensuring long-term access
- Saving money
- Creating meaningful documents
- Enabling interoperability
Not only are these all things that users want, but they are things that are inherent in an open format, and which incur additional effort to achieve (if they are even posssible) in a closed proprietary format!
That’s why you will rarely hear a proprietary software company do anything but talk up how “open” they are – they know they are running on borrowed time using closed and crippled proprietary formats, but they need to recoup that investment of re-creating something that already existed (or preventing a truly Open Standard from replacing an existing stop-gap measure.)
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