Where Did ODF Disappear to? (And How to Fix it)

Readers with good memories may remember various key fights over the years that were largely about ODF and OOXML. The first round culminated in the extraordinarily shoddy fast-tracking of OOXML through the ISO standards process. Then we had a big battle over open standards in general, which also involved ODF and OOXML, where the UK government performed a dizzying series of U-turns. 

On Open Enterprise blog.

How Microsoft Fought True Open Standards IV

Yesterday I looked at the first part of a long document that Microsoft sent the Cabinet Office in October last year. Here I'd like to explore one of the other sections, which is headed as follows:

On Open Enterprise blog.

Does Microsoft Office Lock-in Cost the UK Government £500 Million?

In may last column, I wrote about Microsoft's efforts last year to derail any possible adoption of ODF. That's very telling, because in a way it's quite separate from the issue of open standards, and it shows that one of Microsoft's chief fears is losing the extremely lucrative office suite business. But just how lucrative is it? An email from Microsoft that is apparently circulating around the Treasury department sheds some interesting light on this. Here's what it says:

On Open Enterprise blog.

How Microsoft Fought True Open Standards II

In yesterday's post about Microsoft's lobbying of the Cabinet Office against truly open standards based on RF licensing, I spent some time examining the first part of a letter sent by the company on 20 May last year. The second part concentrates on the issue of open standards for document exchange. This touches on one of the most brutal episodes in recent computing history - the submission of Microsoft's OOXML file format to ISO for approval. 

On Open Enterprise blog.

The British Library's Future: Shiny, Locked-Down Knowledge?

Yesterday, Computerworld UK carried an interesting report headed “British Library explores research technologies of the future”. Here's what it hopes to achieve:

On Open Enterprise blog.

Where and Whither Mozilla?

The importance of Mozilla and its Firefox browser went up a notch last week. For it was then that it became clear that Microsoft has little intention of following a very particular standard – its own OOXML, pushed through the ISO at great cost to that institution's authority. Contrast that with Microsoft's increasingly positive signals about Web standards, which it is adopting with notable fervency – largely thanks to Firefox.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Microsoft's Gift to Open Standards

Long-time readers of this blog will recall the bitter fight over the submission of Microsoft's OOXML formats to the ISO. To the dismay of most people in the world of open source, a compromise was reached that enabled Microsoft to claim that OOXML was being approved. Here is how Alex Brown, who played a crucial role in the standardisation process, describes it:

On Open Enterprise blog.

British Library Helps Lock Down More Knowledge

It has been a sad spectacle to see the British Library – without doubt once the greatest library in the world, and hence a powerful force for disseminating knowledge as widely as possible - become more and more enmeshed in locking down research in proprietary formats.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Help Me Go Mano a Mano with Microsoft

Next week, I'm taking part in a debate with a Microsoft representative about the passage of the OOXML file format through the ISO process last year. Since said Microsoftie can draw on the not inconsiderable resources of his organisation to provide him with a little back-up, I thought I'd try to even the odds by putting out a call for help to the unmatched resource that is the Linux Journal community. Here's the background to the meeting, and the kind of info I hope people might be able to provide....

On Linux Journal.

ODF and the Art of Interoperability

It's hard to believe that there was such sound and fury when OOXML was being pushed through the ISO process. At the time, it seemed like the end of the world, since it looked like Microsoft had succeeded in obtaining a nominal parity with ODF, which had been approved earlier.

My, what a difference a year makes....

On Open Enterprise blog.

Of Open Standards, Interoperability and Open Source

One of the key moments in the rise of open source was when Massachusetts announced that it was adopting an open standards policy for documents. Since this was a gauntlet flung down for the dominant supplier in this space, Microsoft, it was inevitable that a battle of epic proportions would result. In fact, it turned out to be a very dirty fight, degenerating into ad hominem attacks on the person behind this move to open standards. In some ways, it was a prelude to the equally ugly struggle that took place over Microsoft's attempts to ram its OOXML standard through the ISO process – another important moment in the rise of open standards....

On Open Enterprise blog.

Whatever Happened to OOXML?

Remember Open Office XML – a name chosen to be as confusingly close to OpenOffice XML as possible – better known as OOXML? Remember how just over a year ago this and many other blogs and news outlets were full of sound and fury, as OOXML slouched its way through the ISO standardisation process, finally staggering across the finishing line at the beginning of April 2008? I certainly do, but it's extraordinary how things can change in a year...

On Open Enterprise blog.

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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Open Source? Labour's Working on It

One of the great things about free software is that it transcends politics. Those on the left love it because it is a collaborative effort, born of altruism; those on the right love it because it is efficient and flexible. This has led to some interesting jockeying on the political scene, as politicians of all stripes have tried to prove that they were more open than their rivals.

There's no doubt that in the UK the winners so far have been the Conservatives, who have seized on open source as a stick with which to beat the current government's miserable record on large-scale IT projects, most of which have been way over budget at best, and utter failures at worst (with some managing both). This has understandably put pressure on Labour to come up with a riposte, and yesterday it was unveiled in the form of something called “Open Source, Open Standards and Re–Use: Government Action Plan” (there's a handy version from WriteToReply here, where you can add your comments.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Is the Open Standards Alliance Betraying Open Source?

Interoperability has always been at the heart of the Open Solutions Alliance. Here's what it's first president, Dominic Sartorio, told me just over a year ago...

On Open Enterprise blog.

Sun Enables Open Source for Accessibility

Free software has tended to serve the leading edge of the computing community - hackers, etc. - first. General users have tended to follow later, and those with access problems after that. That allowed Microsoft to use the relatively poor support for these communities as a stick with which to beat ODF during the early stages of the ODf vs. OOXML battle in Massachusetts. Things have moved on, but it remains true that free software's support for all users, including those with disabilities, has lagged somewhat behind proprietary offerings.

On Open Enterprise blog.

German Federal Government to Support ODF

Nicht slecht:

Der IT-Rat der Bundesregierung hat beschlossen, das offene Dokumentenformat ODF (ISO 26300) in der Bundesverwaltung schrittweise einzusetzen.

Staatssekretär Dr. Hans Bernhard Beus, Beauftragter der Bundesregierung für Informationstechnik und Vorsitzender des IT-Rats, bezeichnete die Entscheidung als „wichtigen Schritt, um den Wettbewerb zwischen den Software-Herstellern zu fördern, die IT-Sicherheit zu stärken und die Interoperabilität zu verbessern, denn offene Dokumentenformate werden vollständig und regelmäßig veröffentlicht.“

Bürgern, Unternehmen und anderen Verwaltungen wird damit künftig der Dokumentenaustausch mit der Bundesverwaltung auch im ODF-Format eröffnet. Die Behörden des Bundes werden spätestens ab Anfang 2010 in der Lage sein, diese Dokumente zu empfangen und zu versenden, zu lesen und auch zu bearbeiten.

[Via Google Translate: The IT Council of the Federal Government has decided to open the document format ODF (ISO 26300) in the federal administration only gradually.

State Secretary Dr. Hans Bernhard Beus, Federal Government for Information Technology and chairman of the IT Council, described the decision as "a major step to increase competition among software vendors to promote the IT security and strengthen the interoperability to improve because open document formats will be fully and regularly published."

Citizens, businesses and other administrations will enable future exchange of documents with the federal administration in the ODF format opened. The federal authorities are beginning no later than 2010 in a position to provide this documentation to receive and send, read and edit.]

The move will be rather slow and circumspect (well, this is Germany), and there's also the danger that OOXML will get a look-in, too, now that it nominally "open" (thanks for nothing, ISO). Still, on the whole this announcement is a good message to send to German citizens and to other governments.

Why OpenOffice.org Failed – and What to Do About It

Last week I noted that the release of OpenOffice.org 3.0 seems to mark an important milestone in its adoption, judging at least by the healthy – and continuing – rate of downloads. But in many ways, success teaches us nothing; what is far more revealing is failure....

On Open Enterprise blog.

Opening Up ISO's Can of Worms

Nothing shows better what is wrong with the ISO, and why we need to replace it with a new global standards organisation, than the following post....

On Open Enterprise blog.

Microsoft's OOXML Endgame Revealed?

One of the mysteries concerning Microsoft's attempts to deal with the threat ODF poses to its stranglehold on the office suite sector is why some of its employees are making statements like that quoted here....

On Open Enterprise blog.