The Document Foundation Announces Document Liberation Project

Open source developers behind LibreOffice have created the Document Liberation Project. With this, the developers want to deploy more troops to build tools that can convert proprietary file formats to open ODF files.

The Document Foundation, the driving force behind the open source LibreOffice office suite, has already developed numerous import filters for its software to convert proprietary file formats into .odf file types, so that these files can be further edited in LibreOffice. The ODF specification is an ISO standard document format and is supported by more and more software packages or even used as a standard format.

Despite the growing use of ODF, The Document Foundation states that many governments and companies are still ‘trapped’ because a specific proprietary file format binds them to a certain software company. With the establishment of the Document Liberation Project, the foundation wants to attract more developers to build additional and improved import filters for proprietary file formats. The aim is that more data can be saved and further processed in .odf file format. For example, control over data should be returned to the actual authors instead of software companies, thereby breaking the vendor lock-in, believes The Document Foundation.

The German-based foundation developed import filters for its LibreOffice suite, among others, for MS Visio, CorelDraw, Apple Keynote and MS Publisher. These import libraries are also used in other popular open source packages, such as Abiword, Inkscape, and Scribus.