Microsoft is Losing the Battle...and Losing It

Microsoft must be either really desperate or desperately out of touch with both reality and the prevailing perceptions of its actions if it can allow one of its apologists to write stuff like this:

With the collapse of the former Soviet Union, I thought the days of property expropriation in Europe were over. Now I wonder, following the European Commission's latest policy twist in its interminable case against Microsoft.

To say nothing of this:

This is not a dispute about the goal of interoperability, as such. At the limit, Microsoft's detractors and many of its competitors would only be satisfied with disclosures that allowed them to clone its software outright, free of charge. Formally, of course, this is not on the table. But the unilateral voiding of standard intellectual property rights, coupled with nominal royalties for a company's innovation and knowhow, are a close approximation.

Well, no, actually: it is all about interoperability. People want access to the APIs - the surface of the black box - so that the innards can be recreated using completely different code, not "cloned".

What's heartening is the generally intelligent level of comments on what is a sadly unsubtle piece of puffery.

Going Qwaqqers About Qwaq

Even though Second Life gets the lion's share of the attention, there are several other virtual world systems out there, including some that are fully open source. One such is Croquet:

Croquet is a powerful open source software development environment for the creation and large-scale distributed deployment of multi-user virtual 3D applications and metaverses that are (1) persistent (2) deeply collaborative, (3) interconnected and (4) interoperable. The Croquet architecture supports synchronous communication, collaboration, resource sharing and computation among large numbers of users on multiple platforms and multiple devices.

The ideas behind Croquet are undeniably powerful, but it's always looked a little clunky when I've investigated it, more like a research project than anything that you might use. In other words, a solution in search of a problem.

Well, the problem has just turned up, and involves creating a secure virtual workspace for distributed teams. In the corporate context, the Second Life gew-gaws are less important than functionality like security and the ability to collaborate on any application. A new company called Qwaq, which includes many of the key people from the Croquet project, has been set up to meet that need.

It adopts a hybrid approach for its licensing: the core code is Croquet, and hence open source, but Qwaq adds proprietary elements on top. Obviously, I'd prefer it if everything were free code from the start, but it's understandable if new companies are cautious when dabbling with this tricky open source stuff. The existence of Qwaq, which obviously has a vested interest in the survival and development of Croquet, is already good news for the latter, but I predict that in time the company will gradually open up more of its code in order to tap into the community that will grow around it.

Its business model could certainly cope with that: it offers two versions of its product - one as a hosted service, the other run on an intranet. Although it is true that other companies could also host and support the product in this case, Qwaq has a unique strength that comes from the people working for it (rather like the advantage that Red Hat's roster of kernel hackers confers.)

One of the benefits of using Croquet as the basis of its products is that the protocols are open, and this allows Croquet-compatible products to interoperate with Qwaq's. This means that the dynamics of the Croquet ecosystem are similar to that of the Web, which is never a bad thing.

At the time of writing, there's not much to see on Qwaq's site, but I imagine that will change soon, and I'll update this post to reflect that (and also be writing elsewhere about the technology and its applications). In the meantime, Qwaq's arrival is certainly welcome, since it signals a new phase in the roll-out and commercialisation of standards-based virtual spaces. I'm sure we'll see many more in the future.

Update: The Qwaq site has now gone live, with some info and a screenshot of the Qwaq Forums product, as well as a link to a datasheet. There is also a short press release available.

Microsoft's Freudian Slips

I just love it when Microsoft feels moved to write one of its open (sic) letters. They are essentially corporate Freudian slips writ large, because they expose the real hopes and fears of the company, far from the more controlled environment of conventional PR. The trick to understanding them is to realise that they always mean the opposite of what they say.

So the latest missive, entitled "Interoperability, Choice and Open XML" is actually about lock-in, lack of choice and closed XML. To save you ploughing through all the MS prose, here's the key sentence:

This campaign to stop even the consideration of Open XML in ISO/IEC JTC1 is a blatant attempt to use the standards process to limit choice in the marketplace for ulterior commercial motives – and without regard for the negative impact on consumer choice and technological innovation.

Note the clever way that settling on one standard - rather like HTML, TCP/IP and the rest - suddenly becomes a way of "limiting choice". What Microsoft glides over, of course, is that the choice is within the standard. There are now a number of programs supporting ODF, with more coming through. That's choice. I doubt whether there will ever be a non-Microsoft program that supports fully its own XML format: there will be no choice, just lock-in under a different name.