Open the file formats

These days here in my country – Bulgaria were started the initiative for opening the file formats. Launcher of the campaign is Free and open source software . I am not member of this public organisation but as a user of GNU/Linux I decide to blog my comment about their initiative.

What is the aim of all this? – to change the file formats used from this ministries and government institutions: Ministry of the culture, Ministry of the transport, Ministry of the ecology, National health insurance fund, Ministry of Regional Development and Public Works, Ministry of the labor . All of this government institutions have use the closed proprietary file formats like *.doc, *.xls, *.ppt.

This means – if you want to contact with these ministry offices, you should bye Microsoft Office, and of course Windows. Because these file formats are only supported by Microsoft.

So if I am a user of other operating system, or just don’t want to bye Microsoft Office, what I need to do? As a free person and as a citizen of the European Union I want to have an equal access to all documents of ministries of my country. I regularly pay my taxes and I want to be a treated as normal citizen, not as outlaw smuggler.

What we need to do? – just to put this image and code

< href="http://opensource-bulgaria.org/file/" title="Да освободим файловите формати">
< src="http://opensource-bulgaria.org/file/button.png" border="0"> >

in your site or weblog. This is the first. The second is never to use *.doc and *.xls. I know this is an impossible for peoples which worked in the big offices and companies, but I always use *.rtf and *.pdf formats. Here is a very good free alternative for making pdf files.

So this was for me If you want you can help to the initiative….