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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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In the article I wrote for the On The Docket column in the March 2007 issue of Linux Magazine, I discussed various legal issues that are impeding the adoption of Linux on the desktop. One of those issues is the ubiquity of the proprietary Microsoft fonts - Times New Roman®, Arial® and Courier New®. Use of these proprietary fonts presents a barrier to truly open documents in that Microsoft will not license others to redistribute these fonts. In that same article, I also suggested that this problem was solvable by the development of a set of fonts that are the metric equivalents of the Microsoft fonts, i.e., the fonts assume the identical horizontal spacing as the Microsoft fonts such that, when substituted for the Microsoft fonts, a line of text is identically displayed. To date the Linux desktop has not had access to such metrically equivalent fonts under an open source license. Today, that changes.
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In early February, Red Hat launched a contest to tap into the young, innovative minds of graduate students from around the world. Today we have the winners. The contest challenged teams of three to five students to formulate a group concept plan in response to a business challenge question. It was called the Red Hat Challenge.
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