The Document Liberation, one year after
Berlin, April 9, 2015 – The Document Liberation is a project of The Document Foundation, announced in early April 2014 to host the different libraries handling proprietary and legacy document formats within LibreOffice. The idea was to provide a single repository for other software projects willing to deploy the same libraries, in order to simplify the integration. The project is led by Fridrich Strba and David Tardon, two long time LibreOffice contributors.
During 2014, members of the project released a new framework library, called librevenge, which contains all the document interfaces and helper types, in order to simplify the dependency chain. In addition, they started a new library for importing Adobe PageMaker documents, libpagemaker, written as part of Google Summer of Code 2014 by Anurag Kanungo.
Existing libraries have also been extended with the addition of more formats, like libwps with the addition of Microsoft Works Spreadsheet and Database by Laurent Alonso. He is now working on adding support for Lotus 1-2-3, which is one of the most famous legacy applications for personal computers. Laurent has also added support for more than twenty legacy Mac formats to libmwaw.
Developers have created two export libraries – libepubgen for ePub and librvngabw for Abiword – and are currently working at improving import filters for Adobe Freehand – libfreehand – and Apple Pages – libetonyek.
Document Liberation libraries are available for Corel WordPerfect (including Graphics) and Corel Draw, Microsoft Works, AbiWord, Microsoft Publisher and Microsoft Visio, Apple Keynote, Adobe FreeHand, Aldus PageMaker, plus many legacy Mac document formats and many e-book formats.
Each library under the Document Liberation umbrella exists as an independent project, with its own maintainer, release schedule and license, according to the Ethos of Free Software which is championed by The Document Foundation.
For more information: http://www.documentliberation.org.
Suggestion: official label / stamp of approval for “Document Liberation”
The work you guys are doing is just incredible!
I have a suggestion (maybe it’s already in the works, if so, sorry):
create an official label / stamp of approval for “Document Liberation”
trademark it…
to be able to exhibit this stamp, a piece of software should be approved by the Foundation / project
you specify the requisites for a software to be “export friendly”
then we put social pressure on the vendors to become “export friendly / document liberation friendly”
we suggest to all users to require from software vendors to have that approval (“data liberation” movement)
especially, we require that from governments and public entities
The hope is that over time, software vendors will be less and less prone to change their formats and keep users imprisoned…
Note: being open doc compatible is better, of course, but is a step further. If vendors could at least commit to keep indefinitely the possibility to export in a given format that you guys support, we are already a step closer to the ideal…
Keep up the good work! Slavery is not yet completely banished… ๐
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Vincent Keunen
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Great suggestion. I hope they do it!
First of all, it sounds a bit like bullying software vendors ๐
Secondly, free software developers change native file formats too in a way that makes opening newer files in older versions of software impossible. Some high-profiles examples: GIMP, Scribus, Ardour, GRAMPS. Does it count as slavery too? Think about it ๐
Also, speaking from experience, stamp of approval from Document Liberation will mean virtually nothing for a government agency. They just don’t deal with this in terms of social pressure.
Hello Alexandre and thanks for the reply. Your remarks are right, but every little step counts when conquering the world… ๐
And governments change, due to social (and press) changes. In our little country (Belgium) open source is supported by some parts of the gov but not some others (the city I live in, Liege, just bought licences for MS Office instead of going to LibreOffice – boooo). But recently, one famous developer from our area (Sebastien Jodogne) received an award from the FSF (http://www.fsf.org/news/free-software-award-winners) and suddently, a large part of the gov is saying “open source is important to our future”… ๐
So… every little step counts and the time must be right for changes to appear…
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Thanks for finally writing about >The Document Liberation, one year after
| The Document Foundation Blog <Loved it!
Reblogged this on My Blog and commented:
๐
LibreOffice has 1000’s of features รท 0 cost = โ (Infinite) Value
So for me LibreOffice wins hands down.