09.23.09

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ODF Olympiad 2009 Announced, Now Accepting Submissions

Posted in Europe, IBM, Microsoft, Office Suites, Open XML, OpenDocument at 2:11 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: News of interest about OpenDocument Format (ODF) including ODF Olympiad, Lotus Symphony, and Norway

THE word about ODF Olympiad has begun spreading, with message such as this one explaining what it’s all about.

As you are all well aware , Open Document Format is an important standard for ensuring computer literacy and is fundamental to enabling computer education globally. ODF Olympiad was started on the advice of the then President of India, Shri Abdul Kalam, with the view to bring awareness regarding the open source amongst the schools.

We have been receiving overwhelming response from schools across the globe including countries like India, Malaysia, Indonesia, Nepal . We strongly believe that this contest will help the government and the schools in faster adoption of ODF . (The new FOSS based Informatics Practices curriculum, introduced by CBSE this year is one of the examples of the step towards this initiative. )

This almost intersects with Software Freedom Day (date of opening to submissions), but it’s important to remember that ODF and Free software are not the same thing and they are in fact mutually exclusive. Taking IBM’s Lotus Symphony, for example, it is not as free (libre) as people are led to believe. To quote this short new article:

Though Lotus Symphony is free to use (after providing a name and email—fake credentials work fine), it is based on the OpenOffice.org 1.x source code, which was licensed more liberally than the current version and as a result, IBM is under no legal obligation to provide source code for any modifications. (Effective with OOo 3.0, source code is licensed under LGPL, requiring any additions to the source also be published.)

Office suites with ODF support are bound to take over in more places like Norway where ODF is obligatory. Microsoft does not support ODF properly [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7] and the things it has done against ODF in Norway are documented in, e.g.:

Norway hasn’t the reputation of a nation with a high levels of corruption. But then there’s Microsoft Norway. █

Protest against OOXML

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