2015 was an important milestone for document freedom in Taiwan. The central government claimed to ask all the government units, include central and local ones, to publish all their documents in the national standard format named ODF-CNS15251, which is identical to ODF 1.2. The National Development Council, who was responsible for executing this policy, therefore launched a three-year project. In this project, the NDC entrusted the Software Liberty Association Taiwan (SLAT), which is an NPO targeting on promoting free and open source software, to hold 13 explanation sessions in different counties and cities of Taiwan, including outside island counties like Penghu, Kinmen and Lienchiang (aka Matzu). Lecturers and open source community members from SLAT are responsible to explain why and how to migrate to ODF.
Besides, the President of SLAT, Franklin Weng, attended the LibreOffice Conference 2015 to
share the successful stories of migrating LibreOffice / ODF in different units. In this talk Franklin told people that Taiwan is going fast in adopting ODF and migrating LibreOffice. Different bloggers also reported the status of Taiwan[1][2][3].
Therefore, in 2016 the SLAT decided to hold a series of Document Freedom Day 2016 events. Three events were planned. Each one was held in different cities and was focused in different aspects.
The first one was held in March 29 in Pingtung County Government. There were about 100 attendees in this event. Eric Sun, who was mainly responsible to explain the ODF policy in the ODF explanation sessions in 2015, used the SVG and ODF as examples to explain why we should use the open standard format. Just like all the sessions last year, everyone was again captured by his charm. Then the President of SLAT, Franklin Weng, shared his experiences in the LibreOffice Conference 2015 and told people that Taiwan is in the top of this ODF trends in the world. In the last session a community member Pake Cheng showed the future of editing ODF documents in the cloud.
The second one was held in March 30 in A+A Space in Taipei City. In this event, Michael Wu, who is an artist in Taiwan, told everyone his story about how he learned, what he saw, and what he was suffered in the long way of creating all kinds of art from traditional to digital one in these 26 years. He used to rely on a commercial software which saved the 3D creative work in a proprietary format very much. However one the commercial software was "killed" by its vendor, all his creative work assets were gone and zeroed since he could no longer open those files. That's why he insists to use free software like Blender, Gimp, Inkscape, ... etc. to create his art work. He also criticized the education in Taiwan, which rely on only commercial vendors. He told everyone that, especially in all kinds of schools, teachers and students should use free and open source software to learn the real skills, instead of learning how to use the software only. If a student can learn all his skills with free software, it won't give him any trouble to adopt to any similar commercial software when he works. He will have more options instead of being locked in commercial software only.
The last one was held in March 31 in Taichung City. The subject of this event was focused on the document / software freedom in enterprises. Four talks were given in this event. Franklin first gave a talk about the trends of ODF and LibreOffice in Taiwan and in the world. Then
Ceasar Sun, an senior engineer in the National Center for High-Performance Computing Taiwan gave a talk about how to use Clonezilla to backup and to deploy the Big Data Cluster hosts in the enterprise. Kevin Lin, the general manager of OSSII then introduced OxOffice, an office suite derived from the LibreOffice. Finally, Jason Cheng, who used to replace almost all the internal IT services by open source software and system, introduced more than 100 open source solutions which can be used in enterprises.
In the Document Freedom Day this year we decided not to hold parties for community members but to give and spread the word of why we should use open standard format and open source software. We hope that more and more people can understand and join the trends.
The photos of all the events are in:
