Today is Document Freedom Day, an annual international celebration of open formats and open standards and an opportunity to promote their use. The use of open standards is definitely gaining ground, particularly where it matters, such as in dealings with government bodies. This was amply illustrated last year by the UK Cabinet Office’s announcement of […]
The Secretary has just blogged again about Bristol City Council and open standards on account of fresh information that came to light over the weekend. It is reproduced verbatim below: Following the post on Friday on Bristol City Council‘s response to my open standards FoI request (posts passim), more information has come to light. It […]
Bristol Wireless’ secretary has just published the post below on his blog concerning his recent Freedom of Information Act request to Bristol City Council on the local authority’s use of open standards: A response has been received today to my FoI request to Bristol City Council on open standards (posts passim). The reply was received […]
It’s been announced that the City of Munich has joined the Advisory Board of The Document Foundation (TDF) the non-profit foundation steering the development of LibreOffice, the leading free and open source office productivity suite. On the TDF’s Advisory Board, Munich’s city council will be represented by Florian Haftmann. Back in 2003, the city of […]
The licensing practices of proprietary software companies such as Microsoft have been questioned this week in the lower house (Tweede Kamer) of the Dutch parliament. The questions were triggered by the case of the Municipality of Arnhem, which wanted to switch from the ubiquitous MS Office suite to a free and open source alternative such […]
Whilst the present government’s record may be regarded by some as controversial, to say the least, there’s one area where some real progress has been made; and that’s the adoption of open standards by central government. In July this year, there was the adoption of Open Document Format (ODF), PDF and PDF/A and HTML (news […]
On Tuesday, Munich’s first mayor finally responded to an inquiry by the Green Party (PDF, German) about rumours regarding a possible reversion to a Windows-based desktop environment from its current Linux-based LiMux system (news passim). The response shows that there is no factual basis for the claims made by first mayor and second mayor. An […]
The Open Knowledge Foundation is doing marvellous work in the fields of open data and open content. The Foundation has just published version 2 of its Open Definition. This definition is released under a Creative Commons Attribution licence and is reproduced verbatim below (complete with US spellings and punctuation throughout. Ed.). Open Definition Version 2.0 […]
Earlier today the foundation was announced of LibreItalia, which has been founded by Italian members of The Document Foundation and has the objective of bringing together all the Italian users of the free and open source LibreOffice productivity suite to speed up the adoption and promotion of the suite that is meant to be a […]
Via its blog, The Document Foundation has announced the release of LibreOffice 4.3; this is the 8th major release of the free and open source office suite since the birth of the project in September 2010. LibreOffice 4.3 offers a large number of improvements and new features, including: Document interoperability: support for MS’ OOXML Strict, […]
Writing yesterday on the Free Software Foundation (FSF) blog, Libby Reinish states that UK citizens will soon be able to fill out government paperwork with their freedoms intact. The British government announced last week (news passim) that Open Document Format (ODF), HTML and PDF will be the official file formats used by all government agencies. […]
Great news for all lovers of open standards! It’s goodbye to the ubiquitous use of MS Office formats in Whitehall; and what’s more, the government has decided not to sanction the use of Microsoft’s OOXML ‘standard’ despite lobbying by the US software giant and its supporters. The open standards selected for sharing and viewing government […]
The European Commission has recently renewed its commitment to a proprietary desktop and secret file formats, the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) writes. The Commission is refusing to make a serious effort to break free from vendor lock-in and is ignoring all available alternatives. In doing so, the EU’s civil service fails to practice what […]
On Friday evening the Open Rights Group organised one of a series of nationwide European Digital Rights hustings at St Werburgh’s Community Centre in Bristol. This was a chance for local people to quiz MEP candidates from the South West about their views on digital rights and ask them to sign up to the 10 […]
Today is Document Freedom Day (DFD) 2014. DFD is an annual celebration of and opportunity to promote the use of open formats and standards for digital documents and takes place on the last Wednesday in March each year. Document freedom means documents that are free can be used in any way that the author intends. […]
With about an hour to go before the shutters came down on Friday afternoon, Bristol Wireless responded to the Cabinet Office’s consultation on file formats for sharing and collaborating on documents with government. Our response is reproduced below. Background: we are a volunteer-run IT co-operative which has been active in the west of England for […]
On Wednesday last week, the UK’s Government Digital Service (GDS) held an event called Sprint 14, in which it invited Ministers, civil servants, suppliers and the media along to showcase some major new digital public services for the first time. Among the speakers was Cabinet Office Minister Francis Maude, who in his speech made some […]
The Swiss Federal Government launched its open data portal opendata.admin.ch comprising over 1,600 public data sets, including election results, key figures for cantons and local authorities, as well as demographic information and data at the start of the Open Knowledge Conference 2013 in Geneva, the German technology news site Heise reports. The portal will provide […]
At the end of last week, The Document Foundation blog announced the call for papers for the 2013 LibreOffice Conference, which will be held from 25th to 27th September at the Department of Computer Science of Milan State University in Italy. The Document Foundation is inviting members and volunteers to submit proposals for papers and […]
The British National Archives announced last week that it has released version 2.0 of the Open Government Licence (OGL) following consultation on how the licence could be developed further to reflect new and emerging thinking on the licensing of public sector information. The OGL is an open licence allowing information to be used and re-used […]