[Fsf-friends] Bangalore, 15th April: Candle light vigil for Document Freedom

[Praveen A]

Dear Friends,

Recently International Standardisation Organisation (ISO) is approved
Microsoft's broken standard OOXML( with 1000s of Technical Flaws) also
as a Document standard. India's Vote was No to this standard that
creates vendor lock-in and prevents interoperability. Micro$oft played
a lot of nasty games to get the approval from member countries. In this
context we are Conducting a Candle Light Vigil for Document Freedom
Demanding bureau of indian standard (BIS) to appeal ISO's Decision of
approving the banana standard OOXML

Venue : In Front of Townhall, Corporation Circle , Bangalore
Date : 15th April 6.00pm

The programme is planned as a starting point for
various events & awareness campaigns on  Document freedom .

Please use   following wiki page for organising the programme
http://fci.wikia.com/wiki/Campaign_for_Document_Freedom

Also add your name on campaigners section

Contact : Praveen A <pravi.a at gmail.com> +91 9986348565
Anivar Aravind <anivar at movingrepublic dot org> +91 9449009908/ +91
080 23435606


Why Document Freedom?

We live in an age in which paper documents increasingly get replaced
by electronic records. Document freedom is fundamental for your
documents to outlive the application you are currently using and
allows you to choose and change applications freely.

Previous proprietary document formats have become difficult or
impossible to read within little more than a decade. There is no
reason to believe this trend will not continue if allowed so to do.
Without open standards for our documents we are likely to inflict a
'digital dark-age' on our descendants when they discover that they are
unable to read any of the sources for their history, such as
Government records, acts of Parliament, property title deeds,
scientific research papers, and family histories. They will not
forgive us if we fail to act to protect them now, but instead allow
another generation of poorly specified proprietary standards to become
widely adopted.

Document Freedom and Democracy

Electronic records kept today include records of your government, such
as tax and legal records or minutes of parliamentary proceedings.
Making sure that such records remain in the control of the government
is essential for a functioning democracy. The same is true for all
interactions between citizens and their government, which should never
depend on monopolies or on the proprietary product of a single company.

How to achieve Document Freedom?

Make a stand by saving your documents in ODF today. If your application
does not support ODF, get one of the ODF supported applications like
OpenOffice.org, Staroffice, NeoOffice, KOffice, AbiWord, Google Docs,
IBM Lotus Symphony etc

We request all users to

  1. not send attachments in proprietary formats like .doc, .xls, .ppt
  2. not pollute their friends computers and the internet with
unethically encoded documents.
  3. inform the users that they do not have right to decode the
documents they themselves have written, if they use proprietary
software
  4. distribute open office cds, containing apps with source code for windows.
  5. distribute live cds.

Regards
Praveen

-- 
പ്രവീണ്‍ അരിമ്പ്രത്തൊടിയില്‍
<GPLv2> I know my rights; I want my phone call!
<DRM> What use is a phone call, if you are unable to speak?
(as seen on /.)
Join The DRM Elimination Crew Now!
http://fci.wikia.com/wiki/Anti-DRM-Campaign