Behind and Beyond Halloween

The publication of the first Halloween memo in 1998 was a pivotal moment in the history of free software. For the first time, it was clear that internally Microsoft was worried by this new threat, despite its outward-facing bravado and rhetoric.

Of course, there was no confirmation from the company that the memo was genuine, so there was always a theoretical possibility that they were faked in some way, although the internal evidence seemed overwhelming. But now, Groklaw reports, we have official proof of their genuine nature. The posting also offers an interesting meditation on how all this feeds into Microsoft's current attempts to "go legit" with the ECMA standardisation of its Office XML formats.

IBM and Microsoft's OpenXML: Update

I'm impressed: IBM has just stuck a dirty great clog in the engine of Microsoft's machinations to get its Office XML format adopted as a formal standard:

IBM voted NO today in ECMA on approval for Microsoft’s Open XML spec.

Heavy stuff: I think we expect some horse heads to start turning up soon.... (Via C|net.)

Correction: further to Bob's comment, I've gone to the ECMA site and found the press release announcing the approval of the standard. Naively, I thought that somebody voting against it would block it: not so. Apologies for my over-enthusiastic analysis. I suppose IBM's move was therefore more symbolic than anything. Ah well.

The Tired Old "Innovation" Argument

One of Microsoft's favourite justifications for its monopoly is that any brake on it would be a brake on "innovation" - as if Microsoft were some hotbed of the latter. The danger with letting this kind of nonsense pass unchallenged is that others start using it. Here's a prime specimen:

Speaking in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, Thomas Barnett, assistant attorney general at the DOJ’s antitrust division, warned that forcing companies to reveal their intellectual property stifles innovation. He used Apple as an example, in a nod to growing discontent in Europe regarding the way that music purchased from iTunes is tied to the iPod.

Well, no: if you read works like the splendid Against Intellectual Monopoly, you find in fact that

intellectual monopoly is not neccesary for innovation and as a practical matter is damaging to growth, prosperity and liberty.

The book gives plenty of examples - like James Watt and the steam engine - that are eye-opening in this respect. And since the book is freely available, there's no excuse for not finding out about these fascinating things and helping to stamp out this wretched "innovation" meme.

OpenOffice.org Sprouts in Brussels

According to this story, the finance authorities in Belgium are starting a pilot project using OpenOffice.org instead of Microsoft Office. Nothing earth-shattering in that, of course, but another nail in the coffin (it's a big coffin.) (Via Erwin's StarOffice Tango.)

Brazil: Next to Go Nuts for ODF?

Judging by this article, Brazil's federal government may well be the next to adopt ODF as its official standard. As the news item notes, adopting open source is all very well, but if your documents are still locked into proprietary formats like Microsoft Office, you're only half-done.

The great thing about these announcements is that there's a positive feedback loop: the more that are made, the more other governments feel safe in following suit, which boosts the process even more. (Via Erwin's StarOffice Tango.)

OpenOffice.org Goes Dutch

Just in time for Rembrandt's 400th birthday, here's some good news from Holland:

De gemeente Groningen heeft besloten om een overeenkomst met Microsoft voor de levering van de Office-suite van de softwaregigant te laten verlopen. De noordelijke gemeente heeft namelijk besloten om over te stappen op het opensourcepakket OpenOffice.org. Hiermee is de gemeente Groningen volgens eigen zeggen de grootste gemeente in Nederland die serieus met opensourcesoftware aan de slag gaat.

Which, I think, says (roughly) that the northern Dutch municipality Groningen has decided not to renew its contract with Microsoft for Office, but to go with OpenOffice.org, confirming Groningen's position as the open source leader in Dutch local government.

What's interesting is that it's OpenOffice.org that's driving open source uptake again. Sure, Firefox is more widely used, but it rarely figures as a conscious decision. And it's certainly not one that loses Microsoft any revenue (though its managers probably lose some sleep), as OpenOffice.org will in Groningen, to the tune of 330,000 Euros. (Via LXer.)

Fine Microsoft? Fine: But It's Pointless

According to The New York Times, the EU is about to thump Microsoft to the tune of a couple of million a day. I say: quite right, too. As I've written before, Microsoft just keeps playing the same old games of delay, dilatoriness and deceit. It deserves a severe corporate smacking.

But I have to add: fining Microsoft at this level will not make one jot of difference - it can't even feel a million dollars. Make it a billion a day, and maybe then it will notice.

As a result, it will not change its behaviour - which consists of taking the regulation game to the wire - nor will it change the marketplace. The only thing that will do that is if the EU - and other governments - back open source seriously to provide a counter-balance to Microsoft's otherwise unbridled power.

Plugging Away at ODF Plug-ins

According to this article, there are plenty of people beavering away on plug-ins for Microsoft Office to allow users to open and save files in the ODF format. But the interesting bit is this comment from Gary Edwards, one of the top people in the ODF world:

other developers, such as Gary Edwards, head of the OpenDocument Foundation, said he demonstrated his plug-ins to officials last week.

"They've been incredibly systematic, throwing hard stuff at us," he said, noting that his plug-in enables Microsoft Office to open a 16,000-row spreadsheet saved in the ODF format in 31 seconds. Opening the spreadsheet in Excel takes 43 seconds, he said.

Despite Microsoft's concerns that the rise of ODF could prove problematic for Office in the marketplace, Edwards said Microsoft was very helpful with his development efforts. Microsoft has "the best third-party developer model," he said. "They gave us what we needed, and it works beautifully."

Hm: I wonder what Microsoft are up to here? Could it be that they are resigned to ODF compatibility becoming a common requirement, and therefore accept the need to support it?

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.

Spreading Spread Firefox

Most computer users by now have heard of the Firefox browser. This is hardly surprising given the extraordinary rate at which it is still being downloaded and diffused around the world well over a year since its formal launch.

Given that there have now been nearly 150 million downloads (converting that into a meaningful number of users is probably impossible), it is only natural that people think of Firefox as an incredibly successful free browser. It is that, certainly, but it is also much more.

After all, the open source community has shown time and again it can write great code: Linux, Apache, The GIMP, OpenOffice.org - choose your own favourite. But Firefox has done something else - something that has never been done before by a free software project.

It has translated the secret of open source's power - a huge, distributed and connected development team - into the sphere of marketing. The Spread Firefox site has mobilised tens of thousands of users - not as beta testers, as has been the custom previously, but as a guerrilla marketing force.

Most famously, that force was mobilised to pay for the double-page ad in The New York Times. Through the aggregation of many relatively small donations it was able to take out some high-price advertising. In other words, the approach scales.

But the real achievement of Spread Firefox is much subtler, and more diffuse. The tens - hundreds? - of thousands of active Firefox supporters are Microsoft's worst nightmare: a completely invisible - because distributed - team of product evangelists that it can never hope to pin down, let alone match.

This is such an important step beyond the traditional open source process that it is tragic not more has been done with it. For example, although there is a Spread OpenOffice.org, it is only now that a Spread KDE site has been created; both seem in their early stages. But where are all the others? Where are Spread Linux, Spread Thunderbird, Spread GIMP, Spread Audacity and the rest?

All these programs have enthusiastic users who could be directly mobilised across the Internet to spread the word about how good these applications are. Relying on old-fashioned, uncoordinated word-of-mouth is simply to throw away everything that has been learned from Spread Firefox - and to discard one of the strongest trumps in the free software hand.

Time for Mac users to see the OSS light?

The good news just kept on coming in Steve Jobs's recent MacWorld speech: $5.7 million revenue in the last quarter for Apple; 14 million iPods sold during the same period; a run-rate of a billion songs a year sold on iTunes. And of course some hot new hardware, the iMac and MacBook Pro. What more could Mac fans ask for?

How about an office suite whose long-term future they can depend on?

Microsoft may have announced “a formal five-year agreement that reinforces Microsoft’s plans to develop Microsoft Office for Mac software for both PowerPC- and Intel-based Macs,” but Mac users would do well to consider the company's record here, as its has progressively shut down its line of Macintosh software. First, it dropped its MSN client, then Internet Explorer and more recently Windows Media Player.

Microsoft has good reason to hate Apple. Steve Jobs and his company represent everything that Bill Gates and Microsoft are not: hip and heroic, perfectionist yet popular. Apple has always been Microsoft's main rival on the desktop, but the appearance of Intel-based Macintoshes will make the company more dangerous than it has ever been. Probably the only reason that Microsoft has kept alive its Macintosh division is that it looks good from an anti-trust viewpoint: “See? We're not abusing our position – we even support rivals...”. The Macintosh version of Office may bring in money, but it's a trivial amount compared to the Windows version, and hardly worth the effort expended on it.

This means that the future of Microsoft Office for the Mac can never be certain. The agreement with Apple might be extended, but knowing Microsoft, it might not. At the very least, Microsoft is likely to ensure that the Windows versions of Office has advantages over the one running on the new Intel Macs – otherwise the incentive to buy PCs running Windows will be reduced even more.

So what should concerned Mac users do? The obvious solution is to move to an open source alternative. An important benefit of taking this route – one often overlooked when comparisons are made with proprietary offerings – is that free software is effectively immortal. Sometimes it goes into hibernation, but when the code is freely available, it never dies.

Just look at the case of the Mozilla Application Suite. The Mozilla Foundation decided not to continue with the development of this code base, but to concentrate instead on the increasingly successful standalone programs Firefox and Thunderbird. Had Mozilla been a commercial outfit, that would have been the end of the story for the program and its community. Instead, some hackers were able to take the old Mozilla Application Suite code and use it as the basis of a new project called SeaMonkey.

A similar desire to get things moving outside existing structures motivated the creation of the separate NeoOffice project, the port of the free OpenOffice.org office suite to run natively on MacOS X (there is also a version that uses the X11 windowing system). As the FAQ explains: “The primary reason that we stay separate is that we can develop, release, and support a native Mac OS X office suite with much less time and money than we could if we worked within the OpenOffice.org project.” This is hardly an option for the Mac Office team at Microsoft; so when Gates and Ballmer give Mac Office the chop, there will be no Redmond resurrections.

It is true that NeoOffice is not yet quite as polished as the versions on other platforms. And maybe Microsoft Office is superior – at the moment. But there is nothing that some hacking won't fix, and with serious support from the Macintosh community (and perhaps even financial help from Apple) any outstanding issues would soon be resolved. The emergence of OpenDocument as a viable alternative to Microsoft's Office formats only strengthens the case for switching to free software.

The wild excitement generated by Steve Jobs's MacWorld announcements is understandable, but also dangerous. Mac users may be so focussed on the hot new hardware as to forget something crucial: that, ultimately, it is the application software that counts. Macintosh enthusiasts should refuse the poisoned chalice that Microsoft is offering them with its generous offer to keep Office for the Mac on life support for a few more years, and instead should channel some of their famous passion into supporting the creation of a first-class, full-featured open source office suite.

Firefox 2.0

I commented earlier on how Firefox's market share seems to be soaring; clearly the organisation is beginning to gain some serious momentum in the market. However, Internet Explorer 7.0 is slouching towards Redmond to be born, and will finally offer features that have been available from Firefox and Opera for some time. Potentially this could stunt further growth for the open source browser, and even pull back some of its market share.

The news that Firefox 2.0 is well on its way shows that the Mozilla organisation and Firefox coders are well aware of the threat. Releasing 2.0 so soon will keep the pressure up on Microsoft, and those share figures rising, one hopes.

Microsoft: Same as It Ever Was

So Microsoft is up to its old, foxy tricks.

The European Commission is threatening the company with daily fines of "up to" two million Euros. Leaving aside the fact that "up to" includes small numbers like ten, even if Microsoft were fined the maximum amount every day, its huge cash mountain means it could happily tell the Commission to take a running jump for several decades at least.

Of course, it won't come to that. By refusing to comply with the Commission's requests, Microsoft is playing its usual game of chicken. If it wins, its gets away scot-free; but even if it loses, it can still get everything it needs.

The reason for this can be found at the end of the document linked to above. Microsoft is (cunningly) digging its feet in over the first of two issues: "complete and accurate interface documentation". The second issues concerns "the obligation for Microsoft to make the interoperability information available on reasonable terms" as the Commission press release puts it.

The giveaway here is the phrase "on reasonable terms". Back in 2001, the very guardian of the Web, the World Wide Web Consortium, proposed adopting a new patent policy framework that would allow its recommendations to be implemented using "reasonably and non-discriminatory" (RAND) licensing terms. However, as people soon pointed out, this would effectively lock out open source implementations, since RAND terms might easily be incompatible with popular licences (notably the GPL, the cornerstone of the free software world).

After a fairly bloody fight within the cyber corridors of power, good sense prevailed, and the final recommendation came down squarely in favour of royalty-free licensing: "The goal of this policy is to assure that Recommendations produced under this policy can be implemented on a Royalty-Free (RF) basis."

So all Microsoft has to do to stymie its greatest rival - open source software - is to accede to the European Commission's request and graciously adopt "reasonable terms" for access to its interfaces - reasonable, non-discrimatory and completely incompatible with free software licences.

Yahoo! Gets Del.icio.us

The only suprising thing about Yahoo's acquisition of del.icio.us is that Yahoo got there before Google.

The three-way battle between Microsoft, Google and Yahoo for dominance hinges on who can colonise the Web 2.0 space first. Google seemed to be ahead, with its steady roll-out of services like Gmail (albeit in beta) and purchase of Blogger and Picasa. But Yahoo is coming on strongly: now that it has both Flickr and del.icio.us it has started to catch up fast.

The dark horse, as ever is Microsoft: its recent announcement of Windows and Office Live show that it does not intend to be left behind. But unlike its previous spurts to overtake early leaders like Netscape, this one requires something more profound than mere technical savvy or marketing might.

Web 2.0 has at its heart sharing and openness (think blogs, Flickr, del.icio.us etc.). For Microsoft to succeed, it needs to embrace a philosophy which is essentially antithetical to everything it has done in its history. Bill Gates is a brilliant manager, and he has many thousands of very clever people working for him, but this may not be enough. Even as it tries to demonstrate "openness" - through SharedSource, or "opening" its Office XML formats - the limits of Microsoft's ability fully to embrace openness become clearer. But that is the point about being real open: it is all or nothing.

The question is not so much whether Microsoft will ever get it - everything in its corporate DNA says it won't - but whether Google and Yahoo will. In this sense, Web 2.0 is theirs to lose, rather than for Microsoft to win.