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A well-known problem in computing is the existence of data in outdated or inaccessible formats.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: 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.