I posted the following piece at my other blog (at the Linux foundation site). If you haven't checked out the home page of the Foundation before, you should check it out, as it consolidates quite a bit of news of interest to the Community, including the blog entries of many of the staff.
One of the enduring soap operas this year has involved the ongoing patent infringement threats by Microsoft against “Linux, OpenOffice, email, and other open source software.” According to Microsoft, 235 of its (unnamed) patents are being infringed, and it should be entitled to be paid for this use of its intellectual property. Steve Ballmer believes that Microsoft owes it to its stockholders to file patents to protect its innovations, and then to assert these intellectual property rights in this way, and at this time.
Of course, Linux is based on Unix, which has been around for decades, as have many flavors of Unix created by IBM, HP, Sun and others. Curiously, Microsoft is not now, and never has, alleged that those systems infringe upon these same patents. Apparently, its stockholders do not expect it to assert patents against Unix vendors or users - just open source vendors.
Regular readers will know that my interest in standards is not limited to those that help make information and communications technology work. Over the years I've written about standards created to address concerns more directly relevant to the human condition, such as human rights standards, social responsibility standards, and much more. The world being what it is, I think that it's time I did so on a regular basis, and that's what this blog entry is all about.
At the heart of many of my past non-technical writings lies a concern over whether the standards of conduct (personal, institutional, international) that we encounter in the modern world are adequate to protect ourselves, our children and our future. All too clearly, the reality too often is that they are not. Our environment continues to degrade, our governments often act in ways that we do not support, and we feel that we are powerless to make a difference.
While much of what I write appears here, I also contribute to other venues as well. The following op/ed piece first appeared in last week's print edition of MHT (formerly Mass High Tech), the New England regional technology paper to which I periodically contribute a piece. Starting next month, I'll be doing a regularly column for them, focusing on the New England technology scene.
How often have you heard it said that "patents foster innovation?" That phrase rings true in pharmaceuticals, where investment requirements are enormous and failure common. But does it also apply in areas such as software? Does it really take the promise of a legal monopoly to motivate a typical founder or CTO to innovate? And what about the advantages patents give big companies over emerging ones, simply because the former can credibly threaten expensive patent litigation while the latter cannot?
I'll talk about the negative impacts of software patents another time. But today I'd like to make the case that patents are irrelevant to software innovation, based on my 25 years of representing hundreds of startups, the largest number of which have been either pure software companies or other ventures whose value lay in the software at the heart of their businesses. That history tells me that if patents were to disappear tomorrow, the process of innovation wouldn't skip a beat.
About ten days ago I reported that SC 34, the ISO/IEC JTC1 committee responsible for evaluating OOXML, has been unable to make progress on any of its other important initiatives since the OOXML vote. Why? Because the eleven Observer (O) Members that had upgraded to Principal (P) member status in the run up to the OOXML vote have not bothered to cast a vote (even to abstain) ever since. P Members, you may recall, have more influence over the outcome than do O Members.
There is more than one way to look at the voting, of course, and Rick Jelliffe thinks that both sides are equally to blame. I don't think that conclusion can stand up, though, once you really look at the numbers.In the same piece, I observed that this further confirmed the assumptions of those (myself included) that those National Bodies that had upgraded did so solely for the purpose of voting "Yes" for OOXML, as earlier demonstrated by the fact that of the 11 upgrades had in fact done exactly that. What I had not anticipated was that a key standards committee would now be suffering serious collateral damage when these new members have shown no willingness to vote – even to the extend of simply casting an "abstention," which would suffice to meet the requisite 50% participation among P Members for a vote to pass.
While many nations, agencies, cities, U.S. States and other governmental units have considered mandating the use of Open Document Format since Massachusetts announced its intention to do so in August of 2005, comparatively few have actually done so. Now, one of the early and consistent supporters of ODF has taken the plunge, and done so. That nation is the Republic of South Africa.
On Monday of this week, the South African Government released a slightly revised version (4.1) of its Minimum Interoperability Standards (MIOS) for Information Systems in Government, with the most significant amendment being the addition of the ODF requirement. Aslam Raffee, the Chair of the Government IT Officers Council Open Source Software Working Group was kind enough to send me a copy, and you can find the complete text here. The foreword describes the goals of the program, and the way that open standards figure in them, as follows:
The main thrust of the framework (in line with international best practice), is the adoption of a structured approach with regard to information systems. To achieve this approach, and to ensure the enhancement of interoperability across Government, a minimum set of standards are included in this document as a required Government-wide standard. To this end, this updated version of MIOS contains an explicit definition of Open Standards as well as the inclusion of the ISO (International Standards Organisation) Open Document Format.
One of the more egregious behaviors observed in the recent vote on OOXML was the sudden and last minute surge to join not only various National Bodies just before they voted on OOXML, but also the relevant committee of ISO/IEC for the same purpose. At the latter level, not one but two unusual membership changes occurred. During the voting period, more and more countries joined SC 34, the committee within ISO/IEC's Joint Technical Committee 1 (JTC1) that addresses document formats, at the Observer (O) level. Then, in the final weeks and days before the voting closed, many of these new members as well as many longer term members suddenly upgraded their status to Principal ((P) membership, thereby gaining greater influence in the final vote under the complex rules under which the committee operates (those rules are described in detail here).
SC 34 is one of the more important and active committees in JTC1, and has a constant stream of standards under active consideration and balloting. In anticipation of the OOXML vote, its membership surged – with 23 new National Body members, and the number of P members spiking by 11. When almost all of the new members voted for adoption (most of those countries that were long term members voted against adoption, with comments), many felt that the standard setting process had been abused.
But unfortunately, the damage has not stopped there: since the OOXML ballot closed on September 2, not a single ballot has received enough votes to count in this important committee. Why? Because the last minute arrivals to SC 34 are not bothering to vote.
Tor · ture noun: the act of causing great physical or mental pain in order to persuade someone to do something or to give information, or as an act of cruelty to a person or animal - Cambridge Dictionaries Online
For the purposes of this Convention, the term torture means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession,...or intimidating or coercing him or a third person,...when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions. - Part I, Article 1, Section 1, Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment
On October 4, the New York Times broke the story that the US Justice Department had issued secret legal opinions approving interrogation techniques such as simulated drowning, concluding that such practices did not meet the legal definition of torture. On October 7, the Times ran an editorial titled On Torture and American Values. The piece read in part as follows:
Once upon a time, it was the United States that urged all nations to obey the letter and the spirit of international treaties and protect human rights and liberties. American leaders denounced secret prisons where people were held without charges, tortured and killed. And the people in much of the world, if not their governments, respected the United States for its values.
The Bush administration has dishonored that history and squandered that respect. As an article on this newspaper's front page last week laid out in disturbing detail, President Bush and his aides have not only condoned torture and abuse at secret prisons, but they have conducted a systematic campaign to mislead Congress, the American people and the world about those policies....
The White House could never acknowledge that. So its lawyers concocted documents that redefined ''torture'' to neatly exclude the things American jailers were doing and hid the papers from Congress and the American people. That allowed the White House to claim that it did not condone torture, and to stampede Congress into passing laws that shielded the interrogators who abused prisoners, and the men who ordered them to do it, from any kind of legal accountability.
Why I am I writing about this topic in something called "The Standards Blog?"
The action in multiple countries leading up to the closing of the ISO/IEC JTC1 vote on OOXML has all but erased the memory of a similar multi-state contest involving ODF and OOXML that played out earlier this year. That playoff, you may now recall, involved the "open format" bills that had been introduced in multiple legislatures in the US, including in California, Connecticut, Oregon, New York and Texas. All of those efforts failed to accomplish their original objectives. As I noted in a summary of the rout I posted on June 10, each was defeated outright, except for the ones introduced in New York and Minnesota, where greatly weakened bills passed that called for the "study" of the open format issue.
Now, true to the legislature's instruction, the Minnesota IT department is indeed studying the issue, and will be reporting back its conclusions to the state legislature by January 15 of next year. As part of that process, the public (that means you) has been invited to submit comments on line. The details are below.
As you may recall, Corel announced last November that the next release of its flagship WordPerfect Office productivity suite would support both the ODF as well as the OOXML document formats. That announcement followed more than a year of (at best) ambivalent statements by Corel regarding its format support intentions, despite the fact that Corel was a founding member of the OASIS Technical Committee that developed the ODF standard. In delaying so long to embrace ODF it had seemed to me that Corel was missing the chance of a lifetime, given that its core market was in government users - the group most interested in long-term document accessibility.
Last year's announcement told customers to anticipate the new release in "mid 2007," and yesterday Corel finally announced that the new release is now available - a bit late, and in beta, rather than in final form. But on the plus side, the new dual-format version is available as a free download for evaluation purposes to those that fill in a form at the Corel site and are approved for that purpose. (Additional information can be found here, and the application form and license terms can be found here.)
On any given day you can find thousands of words of reporting, advocacy and debate over the role of patents in technology. One side promotes the availability of patent protection as the source of much innovation, while the other contends that patents have exactly the opposite effect, and many other vices besides.
There is, however, one inequity that patents help to perpetuate that gets little attention. That inequity arises in the area of standards, where the owners of patents can exercise significant influence not only over the costs of implementing standards, but over who can reap the greatest economic benefits from producing standardized products at all. In a nutshell, this inequity works to the favor of patent owners in developed countries, and to the disadvantage of the industries of developing countries, making it that much harder for those living in emerging nations to attain the same standard of living as those lucky enough to be born into the developed world.
I dedicated the latest issue of my eJournal, Standards Today, to this topic, and if you're interested in the intersection of social justice, intellectual property and government, you might find it worth a read. Here's what the issue is all about.