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Today is Document Freedom Day (DFD). Celebrated for the first time, it’s a global day for document liberation. According to the website, “it will be a day of grassroots effort to educate the public about the importance of Free Document Formats and Open Standards in general.” Red Hat is celebrating the day through awareness activities and use of the created DFD artwork, and we’ve publicly expressed our own support of open standards.
As the March 29th deadline for ISO’s OOXML vote draws closer, it’s a time for FLOSS advocates to show their support of open standards. When talking about document standards, the greatest interoperability is achieved by having one standard to which all vendors adhere. Some proprietary companies argue that having one standard stifles innovation, but we don’t think that’s true because complying with a standard does not preclude developers from creating multiple formats in which to create, save and exchange documents. Having an open document standard simply means that text documents, spreadsheets and presentations that users create and exchange can be opened by the software program of their choice.
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As the March 29th voting deadline on OOXML approaches, Red Hat has announced its support of Open Document Format (ODF) instead of Office Open XML (OOXML). The Company released its official position statement on OOXML on Wednesday, March 5, 2008. The statement, hosted on Red Hat’s new Open Standards website, cites the desire for interoperability and the inadequacy of review as the Company’s primary reasons for opposing OOXML.
Red Hat supports ODF, an existing ISO (International Organization for Standardization) standard, which was openly reviewed and developed by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) for nearly three years before it was submitted to ISO for approval. In contrast, ECMA, the European Computer Manufacturer’s Association, reviewed OOXML for only one year before it sought ISO standardization. Despite the short review period, ECMA produced over 6,000 pages of documentation for OOXML, compared to the 700 pages of ODF.
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