Freedom 1
I must have been busy packing bags for our impending trip, or else, I would not have missed this memo. It’s nice to know there’s now a day to remind ourselves and others about document freedom.
Contrary to popular perception, I firmly believe that it is much easier to lose digital content for good than those good-old books. What does it take to destroy a book? A fire perhaps? And what does it take to destroy a digital creation? A mere keystroke. Think about it.
Digital documents are far more vulnerable to sustenance. I can think of a hundred ways by which documents I create today digitally can get destroyed; fire and the delete button are just two of those. It would be pathetic if proprietary document formats become part of that list.
Document Freedom hopes to address that. Why else do you think one of internet’s biggest literary repositories—Project Gutenberg—was conceived primarily in plain text?
I try to celebrate Document Freedom Day everyday with my actions—by saving copies of my work in open formats. You can too. In the end you’re only helping yourself, and helping those that are important to you.
How you can help: Educate your friends and family about the need to preserve digital content. Inform your colleagues, people and policy makers in your organization why proprietary formats suck. Tell them how you can never stop paying for your own content’s preservation; by getting stuck in version changes, and therefore are forced to keep upgrading to newer versions of proprietary content producing software—just to keep your content and information afloat. Encourage use of only those software that allow you and your organization to save content in open formats.