Celebrating Document Freedom Day 2024!
Today is Document Freedom Day, which raises awareness of how open standards and open document formats provide us with the freedom to read and write as we wish:
Remember when you were sent an important file that your computer couldn’t read properly? Remember having to buy or download a new application just so you could open an attachment that you needed for work? The same thing happens tens of thousands of times each day. Can you imagine how much knowledge exchange doesn’t happen just because sender and receiver (intentionally or not) are using different data formats? Incompatibilities like this are usually caused by ways of storing information that are secret (‘closed’), and privately owned (‘proprietary’).
Document Freedom Day is an opportunity to tell the world about open standards, which are crucial to ensure our ability to exchange information, remain independent of software vendors, and keep our data accessible in the long term. LibreOffice uses the Open Document Format, for example, which is also used in many other apps.