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A well-known problem in computing is the existence of data in outdated or inaccessible formats.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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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.
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(Score: 3, Insightful) by sigterm on Thursday April 03 2014, @08:45AM
Newer versions of LibreOffice dropping support for older, LibreOffice-specific formats isn't a problem, because:
- the old formats were (also) open, so we have the specs
- older versions of LibreOffice will remain freely available, including source code
Neither is true for proprietary formats and the software needed to parse them.
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Thursday April 03 2014, @10:13AM
OMG did you just honestly try to sell their dropping support as a fricking FEATURE, really? And you obviously DID NOT READ what he linked to as it was NOT just LO formats, but also StarOffice binary which AFAIK have NEVER been open source!
To me this is just a perfect example of why FOSS only works in a few cases, because most of the time its like herding cats and not only does the left hand not know what the right is doing it also frankly don't give a shit. Here we have one side saying "we need to support turning more formats into FOSS formats" while at the very same moment you have the actual devs going "old code is old and we didn't write it so lets just toss it" LOL. And BTW what fucking good is the source code when its no longer in the program? Are you HONESTLY saying i should spend tens of thousands of dollars to hire a developer team to write my own version because some yahoos in LO decided they no longer want to support their OWN LEGACY FORMATS? Say what you will about MSFT but I can take a file created in MS Office 2K and have no problem opening in the latest and greatest, that is over 13 years of support. Staroffice binary was the default for OO.o as late as 06/07 IIRC so you can't even open documents half as old in LO...classic!
If the LO foundation wanted to look disorganized and mickey mouse amateur hour by asking for more converters at the same time they are actually dropping some of the very same converters they are asking for? Congrats, mission accomplished.
(Score: 2) by moondrake on Thursday April 03 2014, @11:21AM
Two points (I considered posted this as AC :P):
1) the code for reading/writing these files was free software. So it is irrelevant that the StarOffice binary was not (and actually, a certain cleaned-up source of StarOffice was made open and formed the basis of OpenOffice.org) .sxi etc.) which was used as the default format by StarOffice versions 6 and 7 is still supported."
2) Perhaps you did not read the link particularly well since your claim " Staroffice binary was the default for OO.o as late as 06/07 IIRC so you can't even open documents half as old in LO...classic!" is BS. From the linked page:
"Note: the old OpenOffice.org XML file format (.sxw,
SO 5.2 was released in 2000. Every fileformat after that (from SO, OO.org and LO) is still supported.
The older SO formats are no longer supported because it was a huge pile of (partially broken) code that few people could make sense of. Actually I am sure support would be accepted back into LO if someone rewrites its as a new import filter in maintainable code. This is exactly what this project hopes to address. Though I think there are more important things to address first.
As for the tone of your post, particularly your last sentence, I can only hope that someone mods you down.
(Score: 1) by urza9814 on Thursday April 03 2014, @01:43PM
Right, and I suppose you'd say the same thing about the various Winodows 'compatibility mode' options -- why are some MS developers removing these features only to have other developers add them back in!
Why should LibreOffice keep stagnant, legacy code for legacy formats that few people use which could create instability in the program or security vulnerabilities, as well as simply adding more garbage to the code base? The few people who need to open these file formats should be able to download an external module or even a complete external software package to do that conversion. There's no reason the rest of us need to be put at risk for their convenience.