[okfn-discuss] OKFN appropriate for Open Letter to MS?

Mon Oct 8 13:13:30 UTC 2012

Dear OKFN, I have been engaged in a personal project to access some ancient presentations encoded in PowerPoint 4.0, in order to add some of these to SlideShare. I am very interested in digital preservation issues, and it has irked me for years that PowerPoint 4.0 was the only major, popular file format that appeared to have gone truly obsolete. I have documented much of this on my blog, see http://unsustainableideas.wordpress.com/2012/10/02/powerpoint-4-0-story-so-far/ for example (there is also a subsequent post).

I am planning to write an Open Letter to Microsoft (see attached mind map for an outline), to see if I can persuade them to post older file format specifications on their Open Specifications web site (http://www.microsoft.com/openspecifications/en/us/programs/osp/office-file-formats/default.aspx). Obviously, I can post the letter on my own blog, but the visibility is comparatively low (80 views is a pretty good day). So I wondered what other blog might be interested in such a letter, and might be willing to give it some space. It seems to me that it more or less matches the goals of OKFN, so I thought I should ask if OKFN would be willing to host the Open Letter, perhaps as a guess blog post.

This email is about that question, not about the chances of persuading Microsoft to add the specs (or even there existence or otherwise!). Note, I am not seeking to persuade Microsoft to change the terms of their Open Specification Promise (http://www.microsoft.com/openspecifications/en/us/programs/osp/default.aspx), merely to make further documentation available. A previous example of such a Open Letter was by Rick Jelliffe on the O'Reilly XML blog (http://www.oreillynet.com/xml/blog/2008/03/an_open_letter_to_microsoft_ib.html).

What do you think?

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Chris Rusbridge
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