New Group Formed to Promote OpenDocument

[Adam_Moore]

I thought people here might be interested in a group that I have been working on with others the last few months. Following is our press release:

[ovvldc]

[sardisson]

Ditto what Oscar said. Unlike other open standards, ODF needs all the extra factual info spread widely as it can get, given the big FUD engine opposed to it

Smokey

[jjmckenzie51]

[OPENSTEP]

Disclaimer: I have a pre-association with ODF (not the format, the foundation)

Actually, this isn't "random whatnot" at all but is actually quite important.

I honestly believe that only the really "hard core" geek computer crowd can realize the need for open formats. Back when I was in high school I went through my angst poetry phase. I had started typing back on an //e and Atari XE and managed to move all of my writings over to a IIsi. But...

I aggregated them in Quark on my school machines.

While I didn't care for *years*, a few months ago I got the fear and decided it'd be fun to read them again.

Fired up a machine with SCSI, but the old Quantum hard drive was dead. Of course, five years ago I had purchasd an old Sun-branded Exabyte tape drive and backed up my entire set of hard drives. Finding an old version of Retrospect on a friend's PowerBook allowed me to restore them, so I got the Quark file back.

Bummer is, I didn't have Quark. After months spent searching in closests for tapes and restoring the file, I had nothing I could read it with.

Thankfully I tracked down an ancient machine at work that had a Quark 3 install and I was able to convert it all to PDF. The fonts were gone, so the formatting is toast, but I do have the content solely through the luck of finding access to a machine that could read my file. I have dozens of letters stored on tape that are no longer accessible that my Atari 410 tape drive bit the dust along with AtariWriter. They're gone. But at least I could resurrect 600 pages of my childhood rantings.

Are they worth it? Probably to no one but me and maybe a few English teachers who graded it on the way on out to the great world beyond. But to me they're gold. As I grow older I find nothing more hilarious then looking back on myself.

I've personally experienced the horrors of both digital obsolence and closed file formats while trying to "remember" my past. This digital age is nothing like the past. You can't just keep carbon copies of letters to your pen pals, you must be proactive about both backups, transitions in equipment, and after all of that finding that dead application that can read your files once you've restored them.

Is ODF itself important? Can a file format really change the world? Perhaps so, perhaps not. Heck, there are ASCII files I can't even recover since the tapes are dead. But if I could at least I could still read them...

What is *extremely* important about ODF is that it's the first format that espouses the concept of data freedom. What people need to realize is that data freedom goes beyond any political ideals or requirements. Data freedom is about allowing your grandkids to have the ability to read what their grandparents wrote during their own struggle to really understand their own lives. How horrid would it be if we could no longer read Sophocles just because there's no longer any punch card readers or (gasp) no longer any functional computer that can understand the DRM on the files.

The digital age brings with it the ability to amass amazing quantities of data that can create a historical archive that mankind has never been able to store before. We need to take a page from history and make sure we don't lose it all, especially that which we don't see as important now since hindsight is a gift that is only taught through experience.

ed

[Adam_Moore]

Damn ed we should have quoted you in our press release

Thanks guys we appreciate the encouragement. Keep up the good work here things like this project is what keeps the format going and growing.

Adam

[OPENSTEP]

Nah, it's not quoteworthy, just a story. It's one, however, that's just going to be repeated thousands of times. There is no history without preservation. Digital information is not any type of godsend since, at the end of the day, the physical media and equipment to read it determines the longevity of the information. That in and of itself is going to become one of the most major issues facing mankind. A clay tablet has an order of magnitude more shelf life than a digital tape of the Voyager recordings from just decades ago.

There's no need for proprietary formates to complicate things for everyone down the road. Without them there are problems enough

ed

[OPENSTEP]

(for the curious, bad middle school and high school poetry is here. note the 13 yr. old conceit of page 2 )

I had been specifically searching for this sonnet of which I could only remember the first line. It's very special to me and was nearly lost (history above). On pg. 291 of the Quark doc. I wrote it over a month after I was rejected by my high school crush (admit it, you had one too, and you remember how bad that felt...) but it was a really good thing and very healthy in retrospect. I was stoked to find this piece of high school angst after spending months trying to recover that file claimed by Quark. The title is eerily apropos even though the meter breaks down from time to time and could use some revising:

Sonnet, Veiled Memory

The gales of time that sink the weakened past
Have spared this gem I covet through my pains,
That gilded mem'ry time allowed to last
Held steadfast by my love for you remains.
Though I remember only shadows now,
I still can see your face across the mist,
Time's darkness touched not upon your brow,
Since thoughts of joy in storm do never list.
Though never could reality be mine
Since neither loved nor ever seen was I,
I hold a dream impregnable to time
And still will dream when under ground I lie.
Regardless of how many there will be
For you, the first, my heart shall live for thee.

ed

[Guest]

Ah but hurt has no meter or time. It just is what it is.

[yoxi]

Time heals all wounds (and, as Groucho tells us, "Time wounds all heels"...)

- yoxi

[jakeOSX]

as a poet/coder myself (granted a much lower level coder) i've always been intriuged by the similarities between verse and code. i always wanted to write a poem that could be read outloud and complied.

now if that isn't art-geek, i dunno what is.

[yoxi]

[OPENSTEP]