We are young and free

Posted by Andrew McRae, Senior Software Engineer

A short time ago I visited the British Museum, where I had the privilege of viewing the prized exhibit known as the Rosetta Stone. The stone contains three different scripts: classical Greek, demotic Egyptian, and hieroglyphic Egyptian. It is famous because, prior to its discovery, hieroglyphic Egyptian was undecipherable. It did not matter at all that the historians had many samples of the language - what they lacked was the ability to decode it! The stone brought to light meaning that had been stored away in Egyptian scripture for thousands of years.

More recently, much has been made of how rapidly our digital standards are changing. As more and more application formats are developed (similar to the evolution of different languages), we begin to need more and more digital “Rosetta Stones” to unlock the information stored on our computers and disks. For example, I recently brought an old 8" floppy disk into the office, just to show the younger generation of Google engineers an artifact from my own garage. While we can read stone tablets that are thousands of years old, given the rate at which digital formats evolve and new storage mediums are invented, we can't read documents that were written just a few years ago (without going to the computer museum to dig up the right equipment).

This is a very real problem experienced in very practical situations, such as the need for the National Archives to digitally store official documents for future access. Beyond just physically reading the media, a format is needed that can be guaranteed to be usable, whatever happens over time. Similar to the Internet Protocols, this is only practically achieved with openly published and supported standards.

So this week Google Australia, along with The Internet Society and the Sydney Linux Users Group, is hosting the first Sydney Document Freedom Day, a global day for document liberation. It will be a day of grassroots effort to educate the public about the importance of Free Document Formats and Open Standards in general. We are very pleased to welcome Senator Kate Lundy and David Vaile, Executive Director of the Cyberspace Law and Policy Centre, UNSW as our guest speakers. We encourage and invite everyone who is interested in document freedom, accessibility of information and open standards to attend.

More details can be found at the Sydney Document Freedom Day web site.