LibreOffice Asia Conference Report: Part 1
Free And Open Source Software (FOSS) Is Gradually Developing Its Commercial Ecosystems In Asia Author: Kuan-Ting LinTranslator: Franklin Weng Foreword: the LibreOffice Asia Conference was successfully held in May 2019 in Tokyo. Kuan-Ting Lin, a university student and civic tech reporter also attended this conference and gives his observations here. In Part I, Kuan-Ting provides readers who are not familiar with FOSS, the Open Document Format (ODF) and LibreOffice a view about how FOSS communities work, and how FOSS grows its business opportunities and ecosystems. On June 18, 2019, almost all of the government agencies in Taiwan’s cabinet received an official document from the National Development Council (NDC). “When exchanging digital documents between government agencies, the file format used shall be the Open Document Format (ODF) if the transferred files are editable… Do not use proprietary editors to directly save as ODF files… It is highly recommended to use the NDC ODF Application Tools or LibreOffice to generate standard ODF files.” “This is the most exciting and cheering official document in recent years!” said Dr. Chao-Kuei Hung, a Science and Technology Studies (STS) researcher and inveterate FOSS promoter. In the document, users in Taiwan government agencies are asked to not
