Document Freedom is based on Open Formats, such as ODF or Open Document Format, the ISO standard native file format of LibreOffice and other FOSS office suites.

What is an Open Format?

When you save a document on your computer, it is stored in a computer file. Whether it is a text file, a picture, a video or any other kind of work, it is saved with a specific coded structure, known as the file format.

To be able to share data, software programs must be able to communicate with each other. It implies that no barrier whatsoever may hinder the exchange of data and the related write or read operations. For such a seamless exchange to be possible, software programs are required to be “interoperable”.

Interoperability is guaranteed when it relies on open standards, i.e. public technical specifications, freely usable by everyone, without restriction nor compensation, and maintained by an open decision-making process. File formats based on these open standards are “Open Formats”.

Where software interoperability is set aside, or if a program editor does not give access to the key information for interoperability or if the file design recipe is kept undisclosed, or if the file design recipe is available but is not followed by the program, file formats are considered to be “closed” and do not allow interoperability. For a software user, choosing between an Open File Format or a closed one has a deep impact on the ownership of and the access to his/her own data and their availability over time.

What are the benefits of Open Formats?

• Open Format documents are readable and writable, by oneself or by third parties.
• Open Format document readability is guaranteed over time as the format evolves without disruptions.
• Open Formats have the advantage of being freely usable by many software programs, enabling interoperability.
• Open Formats support freedom of choice as they do not promote any company’s specific format. They help avoid the monopolistic position of software editors who aim at locking users through their own proprietary formats.

Free Software and open formats, the perfect duo!

Free Software are programs that offer four freedoms to users: the liberty to copy and to distribute the software to others, the right to use it for every kind of use, the right to study it in order to know its functioning, and the right to modify in order to improve it. Free Software designers usually favour existing Open Formats, and contribute to their evolution.

Furthemore, as Free Software developers publish their source code (the software design recipe), recording methods and format descriptions used are de facto distributed with the software.

Open Formats and Free Software share the same goals: to be at the service of eveyone and to ensure users the full ownership and control over their data as well as perennial availability of those data.

Let’s celebrate Document Freedom Day 2020 by sharing with other people the information about the importance of Open Formats. Create your own DFD …

Many schools, colleges and universities around the world use LibreOffice to get their work done every day. The free and open source office suite, compatible with Microsoft Office and a successor to OpenOffice(.org) with many extra features, includes a complete set of powerful tools for students and teachers:

• Writer – word processor
• Calc – spreadsheet
• Impress – presentation tool
• Draw – for technical drawings, brochures etc.
• Math – formula editor
• Base – database

Benefits in education

Because LibreOffice is free and open source software, students and teachers can download and install it on as many machines as they like, without worrying about license fees, subscriptions or audits. If you’re a teacher, you can be sure that your students won’t suddenly be locked out of their documents for not renewing a subscription. They can keep working, as long as they like!

As well as the desktop app, there’s also LibreOffice Online, a cloud-based version of the suite that students can access via their web browsers. You can set up LibreOffice Online on your own infrastructure, with help from professional support services.

Additionally, LibreOffice is backed up by a rich ecosystem, with many companies and resources available to help users:

• Tutorials for teachers
• Official handbooks and guides
• Templates for use in education
• Professional support
• Community assistance on Ask LibreOffice
• Global and local mailing lists

One more benefit, especially for IT students and teachers: because LibreOffice is open source, anyone can study how it works and make improvements. See what you can do for LibreOffice here!

Give it a try – download LibreOffice for Windows, macOS and Linux

Help us celebrate the Twelfth Anniversary of Document Freedom Day by making a paper dove!

Download the dove template and the instructions from this link: https://tdf.io/dfd1, and once you are done with your dove take a picture of it and upload your photo using this link: https://tdf.io/dfd2.

#DFDDove2020 #DFD2020

Berlin, March 19, 2020 – The Document Foundation announces the availability of LibreOffice 6.4.2, the 2nd minor release of the LibreOffice 6.4 family, targeted at technology enthusiasts and power users. LibreOffice 6.4.2 includes several bug fixes and improvements to document compatibility.

Mac users will be happy to know that the issue of blurry fonts on Retina displays has been resolved.

LibreOffice 6.4.2 represents the bleeding edge in term of features for open source office suites, and as such is not optimized for enterprise class deployments, where features are less important than robustness. Users wanting a more mature version can download LibreOffice 6.3.5, which includes some months of back-ported fixes.

LibreOffice 6.4.2’s change log pages are available on TDF’s wiki: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/6.4.2/RC1 (changed in RC1) and https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/6.4.2/RC2 (changed in RC2).

LibreOffice’s individual users are helped by a global community of volunteers: https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/community-support/. On the website and the wiki there are guides, manuals, tutorials and HowTos. Donations help us to make all of these resources available.

LibreOffice in business

For enterprise class deployments, TDF strongly recommend sourcing LibreOffice from one of the ecosystem partners to get long-term supported releases, dedicated assistance, custom new features and other benefits, including Service Level Agreements (SLAs). Also, the work done by ecosystem partners flows back into the LibreOffice project, benefiting everyone.

Also, support for migrations and trainings should be sourced from certified professionals who provide value-added services which extend the reach of the community to the corporate world and offer CIOs and IT managers a solution in line with proprietary offerings.

In fact, LibreOffice – thanks to its mature codebase, rich feature set, strong support for open standards, excellent compatibility and long-term support options from certified partners – represents the ideal solution for businesses that want to regain control of their data and free themselves from vendor lock-in.

Availability of LibreOffice 6.4.2

LibreOffice 6.4.2 is immediately available from the following link: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/. Minimum requirements are specified on the download page. TDF builds of the latest LibreOffice Online source code are available as Docker images: https://hub.docker.com/r/libreoffice/online/.

LibreOffice Online is fundamentally a server-based platform, and should be installed and configured by adding cloud storage and an SSL certificate. It might be considered an enabling technology for the cloud services offered by ISPs or the private cloud of enterprises and large organizations.

All versions of LibreOffice are built with document conversion libraries from the Document Liberation Project: https://www.documentliberation.org.

Support LibreOffice

LibreOffice users are invited to join the community at https://ask.libreoffice.org, where they can get and provide user-to-user support. People willing to contribute their time and professional skills to the project can visit the dedicated website at https://whatcanidoforlibreoffice.org.

LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can …

In the age of the cloud, most people think they don’t have “real” files any more, as these have been replaced by pointers in an online system. They don’t realise they have lost their freedom until they download the file to edit it on their laptop. At that point, they realize that without buying a proprietary office suite they are unable to access their very own contents, as these are hostage of a proprietary file format. Something that wouln’t have happened if they had chosen the standard Open Document Format (ODF), which can be fully implemented by any software vendor without special permission, and without having to reverse engineer an obfuscated pseudo-standard format owned by a single company.

Back in 2012, European Commission Vice President Neelie Kroes said: “Open standards create competition, lead to innovation, and save money,” while announcing the publication of a new policy to help public authorities avoid dependence on a single ICT supplier. At the time, following the recommendations of the new approach against lock-in could save the EU’s public sector more than € 1.1 billion a year.

Working with open standards – rather than specifying a single ICT brand, tool, system, or product – when procuring ICT systems could save taxpayers’ money. However, many organisations were either lacking the expertise to decide which standards are relevant to their ICT needs, or fearing that the initial costs of change would be too costly and might lead to loss of data. As a result, after eight years they still remain locked into their ICT systems or into a relationship with only one provider. How much are we globally losing – in term of end user or taxpayer money – by sticking to the insane decision of using proprietary or pseudo-standard document formats?

Open Document Format is a well designed and flexible open document standard format to store information in a future proof and portable way. Probably its best feature for regular users is that they won’t really notice they are using it, as things just work as expected independently from the specific product used to create the original document. Contents are preserved, and the document has the same visual look even when accessed with a different software running on a different operating system, as with ODF the way you store documents is not related to the software you work with. ODF files are platform independent and do not rely on any specific piece of software whatsoever.

Open Document Format does have a number of obvious advantages which make it unique:

• ODF documents are smaller in size than their legacy and proprietary equivalents, because they are structurally simpler, and as such are more robust
• Content as well as media objects (images, movies, etc) are directly accessible and easy to work with from outside the office application, even for non technical users
• The simple XML syntax is human readable and easy to understand, and this allows to easily recover documents by unzipping the file and access the content …