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Document Liberation Project looking for developers

posted by mrbluze on Thursday April 03 2014, @03:00AM   Printer-friendly
from the hieroglyphics-was-too-easy dept.

moondrake writes:

A well-known problem in computing is the existence of data in outdated or inaccessible formats.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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  • (Score: 1) by urza9814 on Thursday April 03 2014, @01:43PM

    by urza9814 (3954) on Thursday April 03 2014, @01:43PM (#25702)

    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.