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