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Software Freedom International, the worldwide organizer of the annual
Software Freedom Day, encourages all SFD teams to support the Document
Freedom Day 2009 (DFD 2009) celebration (http://documentfreedom.org/) on 25
March 2009. DFD 2009 aims to raise awareness on the importance of accessible
document formats and open standards in everyone's day to day activities.

Open standards are agreed document definitions which are available to the
public to review and use. They cannot depend on formats or protocols that
are not open standards themselves. The definitions of these open standards
are free from legal and technical restrictions that limit their use, and can
be easily implemented in multiple environments - so they can be used on PCs,
iPods, Playstations and whatever computing environments we'll be using in 50
years time.

Open standards protect governments, businesses and the wider community of
computer users from vendor and data lock-ins. Such lock-ins obstruct users
from exercising their full freedom in software and the information they
access. Computers have only become part of daily life in the last twenty or
thirty years, and yet already there are documents that, due to closed
formats, we are unable to easily access using modern software.

Software freedom will not be complete without open standards and open
document formats. Together, they ensure that free and open source software
can be created and developed to implement open standards to benefit millions
of users worldwide.

The Software Freedom Day and Document Freedom Day teams are united in
advancing information and software freedom for everyone. Find out where your
closest DFD 2009 team is by visiting the website (
http://documentfreedom.org/) - and if there isn't one, why not plan your own
event?

REFERENCE:
Rick Bahague
rick@...
Publicity officer, Software Freedom International


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