RMS and Tim Berners-Lee: Separated at Birth?

We all knew that Sir Tim was a total star, choosing to give away the Web rather than try to make oodles of billions from it. Some of us even knew that he contemplated using the GNU GPL for its licence, before being persuaded that placing it in the public domain would help it spread faster. But even I did not know this:

Much government work is done by civil servants emailing Word documents back and forth. Yet Berners-Lee refuses, on principle, to use Word, which is a proprietary rather than an open source format. On one occasion, one official recalled, Berners-Lee received an urgent document in Word from one of the most senior civil servants—and refused to look at it until a junior official had rushed to translate it into an acceptable format.

Seems RMS has some competition in the uncompromising integrity stakes....(Via @timjph.)

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Microsoft Teaches Pupils About Lock-in

I'm amazed Microsoft hasn't done this before:

Microsoft's Education Labs launched a new project this afternoon and it's better on trees and the environment. The group just announced a new Math Worksheet Generator where teachers can generate math problems and email them in paperless Word format to their students. In addition to Math Worksheet Generator, the group also announced plans for two additional projects to be released in the Fall.

Hard-pressed teachers will love this - and won't even notice that they are being turned into a vector for lock-in to Word (not that they aren't already). I predict we'll be seeing much more of this content-driven approach, whereby Microsoft makes people offers they can't refuse...provide they take King Billy's shilling.

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Open Science, Closed Source

One of the things that disappoints me is the lack of understanding of what's at stake with open source among some of the other open communities. For example, some in the world of open science seem to think it's OK to work with Microsoft, provided it furthers their own specific agenda. Here's a case in point:

John Wilbanks, VP of Science for Creative Commons, gave O'Reilly Media an exclusive sneak preview of a joint announcement that they will be making with Microsoft later today at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference.

According to John, who talked to us shortly after getting off a plane from Brazil, Microsoft will be releasing, under an open source license, Word plugins that will allow scientists to mark up their papers with scientific entities directly.

"The scientific culture is not one, traditionally, where you have hyperlinks," Wilbanks told us. "You have citations. And you don't want to do cross-references of hyperlinks between papers, you want to do links directly to the gene sequences in the database."

Wilbanks says that Science Commons has been working for several years to build up a library of these scientific entities. "What Microsoft has done is to build plugins that work essentially the same way you'd use spell check, they can check for the words in their paper that have hyperlinks in our open knowledge base, and then mark them up."

That might sound fine - after all, the plugins are open source, right? But no. Here's the problem:

Wilbanks said that Word is, in his experience, the dominant publishing system used in the life sciences, although tools like LaTex are popular in disciplines such as chemistry or physics. And even then, he says it's probably the place that most people prepare drafts. "almost everything I see when I have to peer review is in a .doc format."

In other words, he doesn't see any problem with perpetuating Microsoft's stranglehold on word processing. But it has consistently abused that monopoly by using its proprietary data formats to lock out commercial rivals or free alternatives, and push through pseudo-standards like OOXML that aren't truly open, and which have essentially destroyed ISO as a legitimate forum for open standards.

Working with Microsoft on open source plugins might seem innocent enough, but it's really just entrenching Microsoft's power yet further in the scientific community, weakening openness in general - which means, ultimately, undermining all the other excellent work of the Science Commons.

It would have been far better to work with OpenOffice.org to produce similar plugins, making the free office suite even more attractive, and thus giving scientists yet another reason to go truly open, with all the attendant benefits, rather than making do with a hobbled, faux-openness, as here.

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Those that Live by the (S)Word...

...die by the (s)Word:

Microsoft is working with Westminster technology chiefs after politicians and peers complained of being unable to open the latest Word documents.

The Mircrosoft Office 2003 software used by the UK's 646 MPs and 742 peers is incompatible with Microsoft Word 2007 document formats, leaving politicians and civil servants unable to read some correspondence.

Could there be a moral here?

A2K Goes ODF

Access to Knowledge is an important movement designed to make knowledge, well, more accessible. Its conferences a serious knees-up where the great and good in this field congregate. This year, they've done something sensible:

Open Document Formats have finally become the default document format for presentations. Having been at all three editions, I am personally impressed that the ISP has come this far. In the first edition, we had proprietary document formats; during the second edition, there was a 50-50 thing going on but the default still remained proprietary. The third edition has proved to be 100% ODF.

This needs to become the default at all open conferences: it will help peopl kick the Word/Powerpoint habit.

Why Kindle Must Support ODF

I'm not a Kindle user. In part, because it's not available in the UK, but also because it seems too closed in terms of its overall architecture. But it's clearly winning fans - and I think that's going to be a problem.

Why that might be is revealed by this interesting posting:

Reading .DOC and (some) .PDF files. This part of the Kindle's function turns out to be much more important than I anticipated.

Mine can't be the only line of work that involves an endless stream of material to read, often arriving as Word .DOC or Adobe .PDF files. I resist printing them out, and I resent the additional hours of sitting in front a computer screen to read them.

By moving them instead to the Kindle, (a) I have them all in one place, (b) I avoid lugging around, or forgetting, that much additional paper, and (c) I have them in a much nicer form for reading than the computer itself.

I think this is right: I, too, would be tempted by a very lightweight system with a high-quality screen specifically designed for reading electronic texts. But as the writer notes, Kindle is great for two main formats: .doc and PDFs. As far as I am aware, there is no support for ODF. Assuming Kindle catches on, that's going to be an increasing problem for those of us pushing ODF.

Maybe time to start a campaign for ODF support on the Kindle....

Remembrance of Things Past

One of the key issues in the battle between ODF and OOXML is access to documents over long timeframes. It's not just a matter of which format is better now, but which will be better in a hundred years time (assuming all the computers haven't melted by then).

Against that background, the following is interesting:

After you install Office 2003 SP3, some Microsoft Office Excel 2003, Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2003, Microsoft Office Word 2003, and Corel Draw (.cdr) file formats are blocked. By default, these file formats are blocked because they are less secure. They may pose a risk to you.

Leaving aside the fact that Microsoft is trying to protect you from its own earlier formats, there's an important issue here. Most people will blithely apply this and other Service Packs, trusting in the great god Bill to do the right thing. And then one day, they will need to access some old - but crucially important - file saved in the earlier format. All the previous versions of Microsoft Office may well have been discarded: then what?

Well, you could always edit the registry, bearing in mind:

Warning Serious problems might occur if you modify the registry incorrectly by using Registry Editor or by using another method. These problems might require that you reinstall the operating system. Microsoft cannot guarantee that these problems can be solved. Modify the registry at your own risk.

Important These steps may increase your security risk. These steps may also make the computer or the network more vulnerable to attack by malicious users or by malicious software such as viruses. We recommend the process that this article describes to enable programs to operate as they are designed to or to implement specific program capabilities. Before you make these changes, we recommend that you evaluate the risks that are associated with implementing this process in your particular environment. If you decide to implement this process, take any appropriate additional steps to help protect the system. We recommend that you use this process only if you really require this process.

Er, maybe not.

There's no reason to suppose that things will be any different for OOXML, which may - who knows? - turn out to be just as dangerous as those risky old Office formats. And so there you will be, with an XML file legible only in part, with an admixture of effectively random 1s and 0s, a vague memory of its original form and contents, and a deep sadness in your heart.