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A well-known problem in computing is the existence of data in outdated or inaccessible formats. A common reason for this inability to access data is the use of proprietary file-formats that result in vendor lock-in. At the Libregraphics conference in Germany, project leader Fridrich Strba announced the Document Liberation Project sponsored by The Document Foundation, which aims to attract open source developers to help provide tools for the conversion of files to the ODF ISO standard document format.
The project goals are:
- to try to understand the structure and details of proprietary, undocumented file-formats
- to use the understanding of the file-formats to implement libraries that are able to parse such documents and extract as much information as possible from them;
- to use our existing framework to encode this data in a truly free and open standard file-format: the Open Document Format.
The project is associated with LibreOffice and is already helping compatibility with old formats in a number of FOSS projects.
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Document Liberation Project looking for developers
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I'm not a robot like you. I don't like having disks crammed into me... unless they're Oreos, and then only in the mouth.
-- Fry
(Score: 1) by gishzida on Thursday April 03 2014, @05:06AM
We're talking passed one another here... I don't own any Microsoft stock either... and apparently you are unaware of PC history... You couldn't tell me crap about "open source" when I was using VolksWriter for DOS on an TrueBlue IBM PC in 1983. The FSF did not come into being until 1985... and had nothing to show for itself on PCs class machines really until Linux 1 came along in 1991 [Stallman worked on UNIX workstations and got pissed off when Symbolics would not share their code any more]. I did not use a MS office product until 1996... and then only because MS had strangled the market...there was no open source word processor for IBM machines running DOS... In fact there were no open source word processors until much later.
What I do have is files that were created before any open source apps were available [most of them created prior to 1995]... So tell me once again how I was supposed to use open source apps which did not exist THEN? I avoidded MS products... they were over priced. So the files I have are NOT even Microsoft products! JustWrite and Q&A were by Symantec. As for Visio... MS bought Visio just after rev 2 was released then soon scuttled the earlier format.... again without any open source equivalent being available...
So what you are saying that rather than open the doors of open source to help people with these old formats you'd rather wave your finger and say shame on you for not having open source before the FSF was even created???? Relatively speaking open source word processing is very new to the market place... and would not even be there if someone at the late great Sun Microsystems had not bought a German proprietary source product [Star Office] and then released it as open source...
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Thursday April 03 2014, @05:08AM
One word: ASCII. (wait, that is not a word! But it is a STANDARD!)
(Score: 1) by gishzida on Thursday April 03 2014, @05:43AM
In 1982 Wang Word processing terminals was a standard too... until it was shown a $3000 PC could replace a $40,000 specialized word processing system.
IBM included in DOS 1.1 a text editor called e.... but e was a text editor and not a word processor.
The early "king of the hill" for DOS was WordStar. Later WordPerfect took the crown... there were a lot of other smaller competitors like JustWrite, Q&A, ClarisWorks, BrownBag, and VolksWriter. Then MS started playing dirty games of FUD... which no one caught wind of until the Anti-trust case... Frankly Microsoft should have been broken up then... too bad that the Bush Administration did not agree and let them off the hook.
Alas... what might have been!
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Thursday April 03 2014, @09:55AM
Sorry, gotta throw a flag, bullshit on the field. Everybody blames "teh evil M$!" when in reality the ENTIRE HISTORY of MSFT can be encapsulated in the sentence "and then the other guy did something REALLY dumb". All that "EEE" memo bullshit? Was frankly more about a company trying to cover up the fact their entire history was being blessed with pants on head retarded competitors than it was any real brilliant plan, in fact the closest you can get to saying MSFT was brilliant was Bill gates managing to bullshit the press for nearly half a decade with the vaporware that was Cairo, but again I would argue that even being able to pull that off came down to the zeitgeist of the early 90s being all things sci-fi and VR and Gates just said "ummm, yeah we got that!" and the press bought it.
Now how does this apply to Wordperfect and the rise of Word? Simple WP had had several megahits in the DOS era, had the market all but locked up (kinda like MSFT in the early 00s with PCs) and were riding high with rising stocks and glowing press, so what happened? Say it with me boys and girls....."and then they did something REALLY dumb"...the something really dumb was saying "Bah our customers are big business and they are on DOS and WFW 3.11, this Win95 thing is a buggy playtoy for the home users, no need to put any real effort behind it" so they put out a truly shittastic version of WP that was just the WFW 3.11 version with a DOS4GW wrapper...now anybody who has actually used a DOS4GW knows they are anything but stable, but to use the WFW 3.11 version instead of the pure DOS version? they couldn't have made it a worse product if they had someone on the line taking a dump into each and every box. Imagine the "fun" of being halfway through writing a very important business letter and go to make a line indent and have the program just crash and take your letter with it, fun huh?
So like Netscape (putting out the buggy as fuck NS4), IBM with OS/2 (gave the finger to the OEMs with MCA bus and tried to charge $200 a copy to OEMs) BeOS (tied first to failed AT&T hobbit CPU, then tried to tie to PPC when Apple had dibs on over 80% of the chips in production) and Apple of the late 80s-mid 90s (fired CEO with taste for clueless corporate suits who filled the channel with crap while letting the OS fall waaay behind) Wordperfect GAVE the word processing business to MSFT by doing something forehead slappingly DUMB. It doesn't take an "evil genius" to win the battle when your competitor meets you on the battlefield, smiles, then promptly blows their own brains out, it only takes enough common sense to say "wow that was dumb, I shouldn't do that" and walking across the finish line without shooting yourself in the foot.
I would argue this is why MSFT has had exactly zero luck making inroads into mobile computing, because Google and modern Apple show no signs of being willing to kill themselves with boneheaded ideas. The only real "skill" MSFT has ever had is seeing when a competitor really boned it and capitalizing on it, without that? they end up chasing last year's trends. But you can't blame WP on anybody but WP, they were the ones that put out a half baked alpha quality build as a finished product and you do NOT do that kind of shit when you are talking about software critical to day to day business ops, that's REALLY dumb.
(Score: 2) by randmcnatt on Thursday April 03 2014, @06:05AM
I spent six months puzzling over an undocumented proprietary database. Turned out that, in some cases, the original programmers had used 6-bit ASCII to encode data, and stuffed unrelated info in the upper bits. They also used the same trick with 7-bit ASCII fields. So we had to deal with a proven standard used in a completely nonstandard way.
The Wright brothers were not the first to fly: they were the first to land.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by zafiro17 on Thursday April 03 2014, @07:13AM
You don't need ancient, pre-FOSS software to have a problem either. The new version of Mac Keynote doesn't have backward file compatibility.
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5525581 [apple.com]
http://presentationmagic.com/2013/10/26/its-not-al l-bad/ [presentationmagic.com]
These two URLs should give you the gist of the problem, but in sum, people are having problems with files created just a year or two ago, which is frankly unacceptable. I know it's turned me off a product I liked until not long ago.
Soylent, Pipedot, Usenet's comp.misc. An embarrassment of riches.
(Score: 2) by elf on Thursday April 03 2014, @08:27AM
They have already looked at that it seems
http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/libetonye k/ [freedesktop.org]
(This was a link on the project website)
I like the idea of this project and think it should be applied to lots of different types of files