Open Standards: Document ‘Freedom’ Day is back, some thoughts

Free Software Foundation Europe one year ago introduced the Document Freedom Day, and also this year a global day for document liberation is scheduled for 25 of March.

The initiative promotes only ODF, other open standards, like the Portable Document Format (PDF), are ignored.

The Document Freedom Day website reports:

ODF is the only Open Standard (as defined by the FSFE) that fits all common uses of an office document format.

FSFE says that PDF disqualifies as office document open standard for a number of reasons. On the contrary Theora is reported among Media Formats. Theora video codec is free of patents, but unfortunately is not an open standards yet and I don’t understand why they mentioning it.

Permanent interoperability matters, both Stallman and the FSFE should pay more attention to the importance to be called an open standard.

Freedom it is (still) about choice.