[sf-lug] Document Freedom Day

[Sameer Verma]

...is on the 25th. Here's an e-mail I got from Software Freedom International.

Sameer
-- 
Dr. Sameer Verma, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Information Systems
San Francisco State University
San Francisco CA 94132 USA
http://verma.sfsu.edu/
http://opensource.sfsu.edu/


====Forwarded mail===

Software Freedom International, the worldwide organizer of the annual
Software Freedom Day, encourages all SFD teams to support the Document
Freedom Day 2009 (DFD 2009) celebration (http://documentfreedom.org/)
on 25 March 2009. DFD 2009 aims to raise awareness on the importance
of accessible document formats and open standards in everyone's day to
day activities.

Open standards are agreed document definitions which are available to
the public to review and use. They cannot depend on formats or
protocols that are not open standards themselves. The definitions of
these open standards are free from legal and technical restrictions
that limit their use, and can be easily implemented in multiple
environments - so they can be used on PCs, iPods, Playstations and
whatever computing environments we'll be using in 50 years time.

Open standards protect governments, businesses and the wider community
of computer users from vendor and data lock-ins. Such lock-ins
obstruct users from exercising their full freedom in software and the
information they access. Computers have only become part of daily life
in the last twenty or thirty years, and yet already there are
documents that, due to closed formats, we are unable to easily access
using modern software.

Software freedom will not be complete without open standards and open
document formats. Together, they ensure that free and open source
software can be created and developed to implement open standards to
benefit millions of users worldwide.

The Software Freedom Day and Document Freedom Day teams are united in
advancing information and software freedom for everyone. Find out
where your closest DFD 2009 team is by visiting the website
(http://documentfreedom.org/) - and if there isn't one, why not plan
your own event?

REFERENCE:
Rick Bahague
rick at cp-union.com
Publicity officer, Software Freedom International