Oh, perhaps Malti doesn't get e-mails sent to the list, here is a forwarded copy of my message (CC'ed to the list so that nobody else gets the idea of forwarding the message to Malti)
/Tobias
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Tobias Ivarsson thobes@gmail.com Date: Feb 5, 2007 10:47 AM Subject: Re: [Digifri] OpenOffice documents in TNE054 To: "Studentföreningen för digitala fri- och rättigheter." < digifri@lists.lysator.liu.se>
Hi, this is the way it has been. But recently Adobe announced that they will open up the PDF standard and release it to ISO ( http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/29/1114228 ). So even if the Portable document format was proprietary previously, it will be open soon enough.
/Tobias
On 2/5/07, Philip Jägenstedt < philip@foolip.org> wrote:
Hi again!
That's more about PDF than I knew. When you push it, I'm not actually sure how we in Digifri define "open format", even though we say it a whole lot. CCing our list, anyone of you guys know?
-- Philip
On 2/4/07, Abdellah Malti < abdma118@student.liu.se> wrote:
Thanks for the prompt reply.
As I understand it, PDF is a royalty-free licensed disclosed standard but, no matter how you put it, it's still proprietary. This little nuance is what stirred my apprehension towards PDFs. Practically, there's no obstacle to me handing in a PDF or even (god forbid!) an MS office document, as OpenOffice can handle both to some extent; It's purely ideological.
But then again, may be it's the perfect opportunity to start learning some of your Scandinavian pragmatism...
/Malti
On Sun, 2007-02-04 at 11:45 +0800, Philip Jägenstedt wrote:
Hello!
Unfortunately we are not a strong lobby group with a lot of power. What we want is for course information and assignments to be in open formats. PDF is such a format. If you use OpenOffice you can simply export to PDF.
Even though the document format used by OpenOffice is open it is not supported by very many applications other than OpenOffice. We cannot (don't want to) demand that teaching staff use free software themselves, we just don't want students to be forced to do so. In your case, would there be a problem with handing in a PDF?
-- Philip
On 2/4/07, Abdellah Malti abdma118@student.liu.se wrote:
Hi,
I'm a new Liu student studying the molecular electronics masters
program
in Norrköping. The TNE054 course taught by Mats Fahlman http://staffwww.itn.liu.se/~matfa/http://staffwww.itn.liu.se/%7Ematfa/is part of my curriculum, and the instructor would only accept documents in Word or Pdf format. I
tried,
of course, talking him into accepting an open standard (OpenOffice
comes
to mind) but sadly, I don't seem to have been convincing enough.
You guys will hopefully have more leverage on the issue.
Thanks for your time.
/Malti
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-- Philip Jägenstedt E-mail/Jabber: philip@foolip.org Website: http://foolip.org _______________________________________________ Digifri mailing list Digifri@lists.lysator.liu.se http://lists.lysator.liu.se/mailman/listinfo/digifri