Document Freedom Day is a day for celebrating and raising awareness of Open Standards and formats which takes place on the last Wednesday in March each year. On this day people who believe in fair access to communications technology teach, perform, and demonstrate. Document Freedom is about all forms of data, including artwork, sheet and recorded music, emails, and statistics.

1&1, GMX and WEB.DE receive the German Document Freedom Award for the use of Open Standards. The prize is awarded by the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) and the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure e.V. (FFII). 1&1 is awarded for automatically adding XMPP for all customers of their mail services.

The council of the Italian region of Puglia is about to approve the law proposed last December that will make the use of open source and open standards mandatory for the region's public administrations, according to news reports.

Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen, when not solving interoperability problems between Open Document Format (ODF) editors at KO GmbH, spends his time developing GamingFreedom.org: a gaming orientated social network which promotes Free culture, and Gluon: a full featured modern game engine, based on the Qt framework.

We would like to see the European Commission back up its public rhetoric regarding Free Software, Open Standards and interoperability with its own actions. This would require DIGIT to rethink some procurement practices in order to open up public software procurement to competition.

The European Interoperability Framework is just one battle among many. Besides the topic of interoperability in the public sector, there’s the task of reforming standardisation systems so that they produce Open Standards, and educating policy makers about the importance of the issue.

FSFE has obtained a copy of a letter sent to the Commission by the BSA last week. In the following paragraphs they analyse the BSA's arguments and explain why their claims are false, and why Open Standards are key to interoperability and competition in the European software market.

First some definitions. In this post let’s define an “open standard” as one that is: 1) freely available, 2) developed in an open process and 3) freely implementable, e.g., is royalty free. I freely acknowledge that there are interests out there that attempt to soften these criteria, but that only demonstrates the competitive power presented by truly open standards.