The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) is celebrating open standards today in an annual event called Document Freedom Day. The event, which was first held in 2008, is observed on the last Wednesday of March. The purpose of the celebration is to raise awareness of the critical role unencumbered interoperability and open standards play in protecting data from vendor lock-in.

According to the FSFE, 34 organizations are hosting 48 events in 17 countries to honor the occasion. The FSFE's list of Document Freedom Day partners includes The Document Foundation, the KDE eV, the Pirate Party of Baden-Württemberg, and many regional Linux user groups.

Document Freedom Day is also endorsed by Google and Oracle, with both credited as sponsors. Many advocates of free culture and open standards issued statements in support of Document Freedom Day, including actor and humorist Stephen Fry.

"Open standards make sense. What makes no sense is that large companies in the field still do not understand this. It is time once and for all to end the pointless nonsense of one document sent on one platform being incomprehensible to the user of another," Fry said in a statement.

The FSFE has published a list of activities interested parties can get involved with to help the cause, including promoting open formats in public libraries and creating street art raising awareness of open standards.

In addition to the typical advocacy activities, the FSFE has come up with an unusual means of drawing attention to their cause this year. The organization intends to send policymakers informational packets including a pair of handcuffs, a gesture intended to symbolize the restrictiveness of proprietary formats.