Andy Updegrove on the War of the Words

The ODF/OOXML struggle has been one of the pivotal stories for the world of open source, open data and open standards. I've written about here and elsewhere many times. But the person best placed to analysis it fully from a standards viewpoint - which is what it is all about, at heart - is undoubtedly Andy Updegrove, who is one of those fine individuals obsessed with an area most people find slightly, er, soporific, and capable of making it thrilling stuff.

News that he's embarked on an e-book about this continuing saga is therefore extremely welcome: I can't imagine anyone doing a finer job. You can read the first instalment now, with the rest following in tantalising dribs and drabs, following highly-successful precedents set by Dickens and others. With the difference, of course, that this book - entitled ODF vs. OOXML: War of the Words - is about fact, not fiction, and that the events it describes have not even finished yet.

A Blog Rant from Absurdistan

One of the great things about the blogosphere is the scope it provides for the unfettered rant – a piece where the author is totally and utterly out of his or her pram. I should know: as a blogger, I've penned a few myself. So I was delighted to come across a fine example, which begins thus:

Another anti-Microsoft (MSFT) front group has emerged in favor of “free and open standards,” hyping what it calls the Hague Declaration and making some absurd connection to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The propagandists, partially funded by publicly traded companies, have a little trouble describing what that term “free and open standards” means (or even using it consistently) but the group has no trouble indicating its political stripes. Unbelievably it calls itself Digistan, apparently to indentify with the fascist terrorists based in countries and regions using the Farsi-based suffix “stan.”

All of these front groups percolate around about two dozen individuals, mostly European. The vast left-wing conspiracy of George Soros works around the edges of their mostly web-site-only organizations. But there is a profit motive. Some seem to exist to raise money from public companies in order to hold conferences at excellent venues. Others run consulting companies to advise governments how to follow “free and open standards” or law firms that write licenses that follow “free and open standards.” Only if these lefties could be time warped back to the last century so that they could ‘fight the right’ in Spain (or sit in the Les Deux Maggot and talk about fighting the right in Spain). Then the rest of us could avoid having our tax dollars wasted and our share values diminished.

Well, you can't argue with the opening statement: given Microsoft's trashing of the ISO process for the sake of having its OOXML format blessed, any group in favour of “free and open standards” must, I suppose, by logical necessity by be anti-Microsoft – and especially anti-Microsoft (MSFT). But I find the idea that this group calls itself “Digistan”

to indentify with the fascist terrorists based in countries and regions using the Farsi-based suffix “stan.”

a little harder to parse, since it seems to paint any region ending with “-stan” with a rather broad brush. I wasn't really aware that countries like Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, or regions like Hindustan, Rajasthan, Tatarstan and Turkestan were hotbeds of fascist terrorism, but you live and learn.

Perhaps the point is simply to get to use the magic “T” word, so that our Pavlovian reaction is to beg – salivating the while - for an honest-to-god, shock-and-awe attack on the wicked state of Digistan, which at this very moment is doubtless re-directing its civil nuclear programme to build weapons.

The next paragraph is easier to follow, because it uses a few tried and trusted tropes. Apparently, this terrorist Digistan is made up of “mostly European” individuals; well, we all know how terribly unreliable those Europeans are – just look at their plumbing. And then we have that old favourite, the “vast left-wing conspiracy”, still in remarkably fine fettle after blowing out 200+ candles on its birthday cake. There's even a little jokette about “Les Deux Maggot” (and who says Americans aren't subtle?)

The concluding thought starts badly:

Then the rest of us could avoid having our tax dollars wasted...

Unless the US government (I presume these are US tax dollars we're talking about here) is funding those unreliable Europeans, or the conspiratorial George Soros, it's hard to see why the actions of this sad, sad group of Digistanis affects the amount of money that the US can spend on humanitarian projects in the middle east one jot or tittle. But the logic picks up right at the end:

...and our share values diminished.

Which is doubtless true if we're talking about “our” Microsoft (MSFT) shares, since the net effect of Digistan will be to make people aware of open alternatives to Windows and Office lock-in, causing them to shovel less of their money into the Microsoft (MSFT) maw, with terrible knock-on consequences for those (MSFT) share values.

But then, what do I know? I'm just some leftie European living in Londonistan, who has actually been to Uzbekistan, and stood in the middle of the Registan. I probably even support those awful free and open standards.

Anyway, if you'd like join those appalling chaps behind Digistan - out-and-out communists like Andy Updegrove and our own Mark Taylor – you can do it here. At the very least it might provoke another entertaining blog rant from Absurdistan.

Update: Here's some another pinko Euro (who happens to vote Conservative), while Andy Updegrove himself offers some calm words of wisdom.

What's Up, UOF Doc?

The battle for the soul of the document is usually presented as a two-horse race between ODF and OOXML. But that's a very parochially Western view of things - there is, after, a third format available: UOF, China's "Uniform Office Document Format", which I've written about several times before. If, like me, you were wondering what's happening in that world, he's a short update from Andy Updegrove.

IBM's Open Patent Policy

IBM's announcement of a new patent policy is obviously important, if only because Big Blue has a big collection of the critters. Whether it will do much to help fix a deeply broken system is another matter:

The worldwide policy, built on IBM's long-standing practices of high quality patents and transparency of ownership, is designed to foster integrity, a healthier environment for innovation, and mutual respect for intellectual property rights. IBM encouraged others in the patent community to adopt similar policies and practices, more stringent than currently required by law.

For a good first analysis, see Andy Updegrove's blog.

Update 1: And here's a salutary reminder from Andy on why it's best to get all the facts before you express your enthusiasm.

Update 2: Richard Poynder also makes some good points about the move.

A Question of Standards

Andy Updegrove's Standards Blog is one of my favourites, because he clearly knows what he is talking about, and this means his analyses in the area of standards are highly insightful. But here's an interesting move:

In my case, this blog is the tool that I control that can project my voice the farthest. And unlike so many media channels today, its audience is not self-selected to be conservative or liberal politically. What this tells me is that I have the opportunity, and perhaps the responsibility, to use this platform when appropriate not to tell people what to think, but to raise questions that need to be thought about, and perhaps encourage others to do the same as well.

Accordingly, this is the first in a series of pieces that you can expect to appear on Mondays on an irregular basis, each introduced with the name "The Monday Witness." The topics will vary, but the common theme will be to highlight instances of action and inaction in the world today that violate widely held standards of human decency.

I think this is absolutely right: as blogs grow in importance and stature, they become an important new way of communicating with people that cut across traditional - and usually unhelpful - political lines. This doesn't mean that all bloggers should immediately starting ranting on random subjects close to their heart (besides, I already do that...), but it does open up interesting possibilities for engaging in a wider discourse.

The ODF Dark Horse: IBM Workplace

By now, everyone (well, nearly) knows about ODF support in things like OpenOffice.org, KOffice and Writely. But a name that may not be so well known is that of IBM Workplace. This mysterious and slightly amorphous product is finally pinned down with almost obsessive thoroughness by Andy Updegrove in one of his continuing series on the ODF environment. Read it for more than you ever wanted to know about the subject.

Geneva BRM Vote Result: It's Clearly "Zlthoy"

If anyone can make sense of what happened this week in Geneva during the BRM process it's Andy Updegrove. He has an unrivalled grasp of both standards in general and the specific background to the whole sorry business. So the fact that I don't really understand his post of what exactly the final result of the meeting was is a worrying indication that my brain has started to rot.

Here's the summary:

There are two ways in which you may hear the results of the BRM summarized by those that issue statements and press releases in the days to come. Perhaps inevitably, they are diametrically opposed, as has so often happened in the ODF - OOXML saga to date. Those results are as follows:

98.4% of the OOXML Proposed Dispositions were approved by a two to one majority at the BRM, validating OOXML

The OOXML Proposed Dispositions OOXML were overwhelmingly rejected by the delegations in attendance at the BRM, indicating the inability of OOXML to be adequately addressed within the "Fast Track" process

Oh, thanks, Andy. I think what I'm looking for here is a kind of Hegelian synthesis of those two contradictory statements.....

Has Microsoft Blinked on Office formats?

Microsoft Corp's director of corporate standards has conceded that 'legitimate concerns' have been raised in response to its attempt to fast-track the approval of its Open XML format by ISO.

The level of criticism targeted at Microsoft's XML-based office productivity file formats is significant, raising the potential that Open XML might not gain ISO approval, but Microsoft's Jason Matusow insisted there is still a long way to go.

This is interesting: it's the first time that I've come across Microsoft expressing any kind of doubts about OOXML, its rival to ODF, romping home to become an ISO standard. I can only assume that there was a presumption on the company's part that for all the free software world's whingeing, the national bodies who have the right to object, wouldn't.

But they did. As Andy Updegrove explains:

14 of 20 responses were clearly negative, two indicated divisions of opinion, three were inconclusive or neutral, and one offered no objections.

This is very different from Microsoft's own summary:

"Of the 19 submissions, some are very supportive of XML and the process, some are neutral, and some had legitimate concerns that were raised."

Clearly, this is stretching the truth to breaking point. I get the impression the company's really getting worried over this one, as it begins to spin totally out of its control.

MA ODF: Drawing a Balance

Following his rather downbeat piece about the musical chairs in Massachusetts over bringing in ODF, Andy Updegrove has now complemented this with a nicely upbeat one detailing the net effect of all these political games. The final verdict:

ODF has had, and continues to have, a vital impact on the marketplace that is highly beneficial to all stakeholders. It's important to remember that the greatest single event that has resulted in this state of affairs was the courage of a few public servants in Massachusetts that had a vision of what the future should be, and had the courage to commit to it and follow through.

We owe them a debt of gratitude, and I think that they will be remembered long after their more pedestrian peers in state government have been forgotten.

Amen to that.

An Ode to Unicode 5.0

Andy Updegrove has a short but justified paean to the wonder that is Unicode, one of the unsung heroes/heroines of the computer revolution. Apparently version 5.0 is now available. Don't all rush to buy a copy at once.

UOFology

Andy Updegrove has a fascinating post about the Chinese document format UOF:

It's called the Uniform Office Format (UOF), and it's been in development since January of 2002; the first draft was completed in December of last year. It includes word processing, spreadsheet and presentation modules, and comprises GUI, format and API specifications. Like both ODF and OpenOffice XML, it is another "XML in a Zip file" format.

And he points out:

Implementation of UOF will continue the trend away from proprietary, "lock in" products, and towards an environment with more competition, more variety, and more freedom for end-users. Presumably, the proliferation of compatible open format alternatives will place added pressure on OOXML to become increasingly open and competitive in order to be relevant. Whether that will be sufficient to offset the appeal of alternative (and often cheaper) office suites implementing ODF and/or UOF remains to be seen.

Something in the Air

For those readers (assuming I still have any) who wonder why I witter on about topics that seem distant from that exciting free software stuff, here's someone else doing it. Andy Updegrove is the best writer about standards, bar none. He's particularly sharp on the subtleties of the ODF vs OOXML ding-dong. But here he's on about something else:

Our modern shelters, it seems, are becoming more seductive than ever. Not only are on-line and other electronic entertainments negatively impacting television and print journalism, but use of public parks in the US is falling off as well, even as population continues to rise. Apparently, our affinity for the out of doors is fighting a losing battle against the delights of our electronically-enabled cocoons.

It strikes me that this is an especially inauspicious time for mankind to become less connected to the natural world. That world is increasingly under attack – by us. The more insulated we are from it, the more abstract that impact will seem. Already we know that the opportunity to brake global warming before it has catastrophic effects is rapidly slipping away. And yet we know that we are doing too little to avoid such consequences.

What we do to the earth will certainly have profound effects on humanity. But the earth is ancient and patient, and able to recover in the fullness of time – without us - from the worst that we can inflict upon it. What would be at most a slight fever for Gaia would be at best disastrous, and at worst fatal for modern civilization. There is no doubt who the winner and loser in this conflict will be.

It’s easy to think such thoughts, gazing at the stars on a windy night in the high desert. Perhaps the earth does us a favor when it holds us in the unseen grip of the wind, reminding us of our proper place in the natural order of things.

What's interesting about this for me - aside from the fact that it's beatifully written - is that it is cognate to my tangential stuff. Coincidence? I don't think so.

Get a Life? - Get a Clue

I came across the following at the weekend:

Speaking at a Microsoft-hosted event, analyst David Mitchell revealed he used to lecture police on riot control, before eventually becoming the senior vice president of IT research at Ovum. "I thought I would never come back to talking about riot control until I got into the Open XML debate," he claimed.

Mitchell said that people involved in riots fell into two camps: "decent orderly protestors and nutters", and claims that both are participating in the OOXML process. "There are a number of comments that are decent technical debate," he said. "There's also a fair amount of radical activists who are protesting just to cause disruption."

"I feel like getting hold of people and saying 'get a life'," he adds. "It's only a document format. It's just got too silly."

Only a document format?!? How can someone who's supposed to be an analyst be unaware of the larger issues? Document formats are the offline equivalent of HTML, and openness is just as critical off as on the Web. To say that "it's only a document format" misses the point entirely.

Having boiled up a nice vat of invective, I was going to lay into this wrong-headed thinking at some length, when I came across this post by Andy Updegrove, which is not only one of his best, but I would venture that it is also one of his most important. It says more less exactly what I was going to say, only rather better:

It should not go unmentioned that the stakes for society are even higher than I have thus far suggested, because the questions raised above extend beyond the field of ITC [information technology and communications]. Standards of equal importance are urgently needed in other areas as well. These will have as profound an impact on commerce and the human condition in areas such as global warming, and will tell us what we can and cannot do except at our peril, how we will determine whether we are winning or losing that battle, and how we can police ourselves from subjecting ourselves to further environmental degradation.

So it is we see that what happens in Geneva this week is about far more than whether Microsoft wins and IBM and its allies lose or vis-versa, even if that will be the superficial result. It is about fundamental human rights, about not only seizing but also securing the opportunities of the future for the benefit of all. Only by thinking clearly and deeply about these larger issues will we be able to adapt the practices of the past to meet the challenges of a future that has already arrived, whether we realize it or not.

Microsoft: Do You Have to Be So Blatant?

Massachusetts, we know, has had a troubled time when it comes to implementing ODF. But here's some fresh blood on the technical advisory group that will oversee that project. Oh, but wait a minute, who's this newcomer? Andy Updegrove has the details:

That person is Brian Burke, the Microsoft Regional Director for Public Affairs, and if that surprises you, it surprises me as well, given the degree of acrimonious debate and disinformation witnessed in Massachusetts over the last 15 months involving the Information Technology Division's transition to ODF.

Er, Microsoft? As in "not-really-keen-on-ODF" Microsoft? Isn't this a little bit, well, you know - blatant?

Emoticonatronic

I'd have expected this news about a new Emotion Incubator Group at the W3C to have been released on the 1st April:

Emotion-oriented (or "affective") computing is gaining importance as interactive technological systems become more sophisticated. Representing the emotional states of a user or the emotional states to be simulated by a user interface requires a suitable representation format. Although several non-standard markup languages containing elements of emotion annotation have been proposed, none of these languages have undergone thorough scrutiny by emotion researchers, nor have they been designed for generality of use in a broad range of application areas.

Well done Andy Updegrove for spotting this: quiet day at the office, Andy?

Anti-ODF Stuff Turns Nasty

With his customary sharpness, Andy Updegrove skewers a particularly nasty piece of lobbyist punditry. The statement in question manages to twist the news that Massachusetts is calling for an ODF plug-in for Microsoft Office - an eminently sensible thing to do, which the open source world is keen to support - into some kind of act of desperation.

It then goes on:

the Massachusetts ODF policy ... is a biased, open source only preference policy. We believe such preference policies exclude choice, needlessly marginalize successful marketplace options, and curtail merit-based selections for state procurements. In short, they disserve citizens who demand cost-effective solutions for their hard-earned tax dollars.

This is rich. It is factually incorrect - there is no open source only preference policy; it is hyperbolic - the idea of Microsoft Office being "marginalised" is droll, to say the least, as is the idea that "successful marketplace options" deserve to have their near-monopolies preserved; and ultimately (wilfully) misses the point, which is that a truly open standard is the only way to guarantee future access to files, the only way to allow competition among software manufacturers, and so the only way to provide "choice" and the "merit-based", "cost-effective" solution the statement purports to espouse.

A Question of Standards

Good to see Andy Updegrove's blog getting Slashdotted. This is good news not just for him, but also for his argument, which is that open source ideas are expanding into new domains (no surprise there to readers of this blog), and that traditional intellectual property (IP) models are being re-evaluated as a result.

Actually, this piece is rather atypical, since most of the posts are to do with standards, rather than open source or IP (though these are inevitably bound up with standards). Andy's blog is simply the best place to go for up-to-the-minute information on this area; in particular, he is following the ODF saga more closely - and hence better - than anyone. In other words, he's not just reporting on standards, but setting them, too.

ODF Gets Interestinger

Who would have thought file formats could be such fun?

The great battle over whether the OpenDocument format should be adopted in Massachusetts has taken another dramatic turn with the appointment of a successor to Peter Quinn, the man who took most of the flak for introducing the policy in the first place.

What's most striking is that the press release announcing the new CIO goes out of its way to emphasise that he will be "responsible for overseeing the final stages of implementation of the state's new Open Document format proposal, to go into effect in January 2007" (via Andy Updegrove's Standards Blog). In other words, all the talk about how the ODF decision was being rolled back was premature, to say the least.

Microsoft is unlikely to take this lying down - too much is at stake. If it loses Massachusetts in this way, it will create a terrible precedent for the company. It will reveal that that there is, in fact, life after Microsoft Office. And once users start to experience the huge benefits of employing open formats - freedom from vendor lock-in, the ability to deploy a range of different applications on several platforms, easy archiving etc. - the trickle of defections will soon become positively Amazonian.

Expect things to get even more interestinger.