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A well-known problem in computing is the existence of data in outdated or inaccessible formats.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 Hairyfeet on Thursday April 03 2014, @09:19AM
But how often does that actually happen IRL anymore? I mean we have virtual machines now folks, no need to keep ancient hardware around anymore to run some dinosaur OS. Hell just for shits and giggles a few years back I searched across the net for installers or .ISOs of all the old OSes I ever used to see if i could get them running in VMs and...it really wasn't difficult at all.
There were emulators that let me run the old Commodore BASIC, all the old DOS and Windows versions, OS/2, even the old Motorola Apple had an emulator that could run it and again REALLY straight forward. Oh and many of the emulators support CD and floppies so all it takes is a USB floppy and a CD/DVD drive in the host and you can run just about anything...hell I really wouldn't be surprised if somebody has a USB to cassette drive adapter for using the old Commodore and TRS80 cassettes.
So I really don't understand the fuss, if you saved in some funky ancient format you can either use something that still supports said old funky format (which in the case of old MS Office file formats is beyond easy as MS Office 2K runs on Win 7 great and IIRC goes back to Word 3 as far as format support) or fire up a VM and run old funky software to convert it into something like RTF that everything supports.