Well, I know that you're not supposed to check your email while on vacation, but among other things, I had learned last week that the Mass ITD would be issuing its mid-year statement on accessibility about now, and wanted to check in to see what it said. What I didn't expect was to find that someone at ZDNet had run a fantasy piece like this, which not only inaccurately reports that the ITD has been mandating open source implementations of ODF, but for some reason decides that I'm to blame for any delay in implementing ODF. I suppose I should be complimented if I can change the course of history with my virtual pen, but for better or worse, that's simply not the case.
Based on my own sources, here is what is right and wrong about what's been reported so far:
Right: Massachusetts CIO Louis Gutierrez met with representatives of the community of the disabled last Friday to brief them on a letter that will be sent to community leaders today. It promises to use plugins in order to save documents in ODF form in order to alleviate accessibility concerns. The ITD has also now signed a long-awaited Memorandum of Understanding with the Massachusetts Office on Disability and the state's Department of Health and Human Service The ITD also signed a commitment with the Massachusetts Office on Disability and the state's Department of Health and Human Service to design, procure, certify and develop training for software that is accessible to people with disabilities, as well as to establish a unit devoted to accessible technology, expanding on its launch in May of an accessibility lab to a similar purpose.
I've learned that it's also true that use of ODF compliant applications will not be mandatory on January 1 by employees of the Executive Agencies.
The following blog entry was submitted to the Arizona Daily Sun by the
National Forest Service with my permission. It ran about ten days later.
Yesterday, I described the impact of the Warm Fire in summary terms. If you read that post, you'll find a description that sounds rather worse than what I saw on the ground when I visited the scene. In order to see what the reality behind the statistics might be, I drove and walked many miles through the burn area, and was surprised at how varied and hopeful the landscape appeared. Areas of total destruction bordered others of modest, or even no impact, and in many areas the scene changed from one state to the other rapidly and repeatedly.
The principal reasons, I expect, are because the terrain is very varied (rolling, and often steep), and because some areas affected had previously been burned. For example, a slope fifty feet high might be utterly destroyed where the wind swept flames and burning embers uphill, and yet green grass and trees would have survived right up to the break of the slope on top. In other situations, groves of aspen bore witness to the fires of not long ago. In contrast, the Yellowstone National Park burn areas seemed vastly and uniformly devastated when I visited them several years after their destruction.
On the Kaibab, the result has been the creation of what is called a "mosaic" landscape: a desirable, natural state that comprises many patches of different types of growth simultaneously existing at various stages of maturity. How that state is achieved once fire offers the opportunity makes for an interesting story, and the tale of the aspen features prominently in that process.
In much of the west, forests exist in three states: burned, recovering from being burned, and waiting to be burned. Until recently, the time between burns in northern Arizona was two to ten years. But as logging became both feasible as well as profitable, fire suppression became an article of faith in the management of national forests. Only in the last few years has that policy been reversed, with the recognition that naturally occurring fires are a necessary and important part of maintaining forest health. The difficult question necessarily arises, however, of how to make the transition safely back to a state of nature.
The Warm Fire on the Kaibab plateau provides an interesting example of how this transition is being addressed in practice.
On June 8 of this year, a lightning strike ignited a fire in the interior of Kaibab National Forest, near Warm Springs Canyon (hence the name, the "Warm Fire"). Consistent with the new policy of the National Forest Service, it was decided to manage rather than extinguish the blaze, and to therefore classify it as a "wildland fire use fire, managed for resource benefits" (this and other details are taken from a National Forest Service report available at the National Forest visitor centers). What this means principally is that conditions were deemed appropriate to allow a naturally occurring fire to clear out the "fuel load" (i.e., dead logs, branches, needles and so on) that had accumulated through the decades during which the preceding fire suppression policy was in force.
If the peaks of tall mountains are "sky islands," then the Kaibab Plateau of northern Arizona is a sky continent. A vast, tilted shelf of ancient seafloor, it stands proud above the surrounding desert, rising 9,200 feet beyond sea level at its highest point. 1,600,000 acres of the Kaibab — the greatest part - are designated as a National Forest of the same name, guarding it from some, but not all of the depredations of civilization (on which more below).
Like a continent, the Kaibab has its own mountains and canyons, cliffs and [dry] coasts, various weather zones, and commensurately varied ecological communities. Its climate ranges from verdant to arid, its ecological zones from towering Ponderosa Pine forests to alpine meadows to desert scrub. Due to its isolation by elevation, it also has unique species — including in one of the rarest categories of categories of unique species - its own mammal. That animal is the charcoal-grey Kaibab squirrel, a prankster that sports not only tall, tasseled ears, but a pure white tail to boot. Its overall appearance leads one to think it would be more at home in a Tolkien wood than in an Arizona forest — and with a speaking part at that.
It's not often that you see standards organizations sue each other, but two - the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) and the International Code Council (ICC) - have been going at it hammer and tongs for the last several years. Both are accredited "standards development organizations," (SDOs) and follow the same business model that almost all such organizations do to underwrite their activities: they sell their completed standards.
In the case of construction codes (the types of standards at issue here) and other long and detailed standard sets, the amounts at issue can be substantial, not only on a per-copy basis, but in volume, since compliance with building, safety, and other such codes is mandatory. Trademarks and copyrights can therefore be as important to non-profit SDOs as they are to any other business that relies on selling a product or service to keep the lights on.
Of course, as is also true for any type of business, litigation is expensive and wasteful of resources that can better be spent on furthering the SDO's mission. That reality appears to have won out in this case, with the two parties settling all three outstanding suits rather than taking any of them to a final decision in court.
Now that the dust has settled, it appears that the NFPA had the better hand over all, based upon a read of the detailed press release issued by the NFPA on August 14, as compared to the much shorter, terse notice released by the ICC two days later. The two releases offer predictably different spins on the settlement, as the following excerpts demonstrate:
As I've often noted before (see, for example, Microsoft, Adobe and the Murky World of "RAND" ), the exact meaning of the simple phrase "reasonable and non-discriminatory" is anything but universally acknowledged. This leaves plenty of room for game playing, and can even lead to litigation — as happened this week when Nokia filed the latest in a series of lawsuits ricocheting between it and Qualcomm. All of those suits relate to mobile handsets built by Nokia that implement a standard issued by ETSI, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute.
Qualcomm alleges that anyone implementing the ETSI standard will infringe Qualcomm's patents, and would therefore require Qualcomm license. Qualcomm is willing to offer such a license (and has already granted licenses to others) on what it says are "fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory" (or FRAND, the European variant that means the same thing as RAND), as required by ETSI.
Nokia, however, has thus far refused to pay up, leading Qualcomm to bring three different actions against Nokia (in the US, the UK, and before the U.S. International Trade Commission), seeking injunctions that would prevent Nokia from selling any products based on the ETSI standard unless it rolls over and obtains a license from Qualcomm.
Now, Nokia has counterattacked, announcing last Wednesday that it has sued Qualcomm in the Delaware Court of Chancery (which exclusively hears business cases). Nokia admits in the press release that the suit is intended as a defensive measure, and seems to concede that its products do indeed infringe Qualcomm's patent. But it also asserts that Qualcomm is requiring license terms that are not in fact "FRANDly" (as it were).
As I noted last week, the Federal Trade Commission ruled unanimously that computer memory technology company Rambus, Inc. had violated the antitrust laws by "gaming" the standard setting process. After the Commissioners of the FTC review the pleadings of the FTC's own Complaint Counsel and Rambus's lawyers in the final phase of their deliberations, the Commissioners will decide what penalties Rambus will have to bear for its actions.
But what does the FTC's decision mean in the bigger picture of the technology industry? One clue comes from a complaint that was quietly filed in the US District Court for the District of Delaware on August 1 — the day before the FTC announced its decision. In what could not be better timing, this new complaint alleges a nearly identical course of conduct by French telecommunications giant Alcatel SA in an IEEE standard setting process. Or, as stated in the complaint filed by Santa Clara, California-based Foundry Networks, Inc. (Nasdaq: FDRY), Alcatel "duped" the IEEE into adopting a user authentication standard that would infringe Alcatel's patents pending, setting a classic "submarine patent" trap for the industry after it became "locked in" through adoption of that standard.
So far, the case doesn't seem to have caused so much as a ripple in the press; I only know about it through Alan McGrath, who spotted what is apparently the only article written to date about this action. The article appears at a subscription-based legal site, and summarizes the allegations contained in the complaint.
Alan was kind enough to send me a copy of that complaint, which reads like Son of Rambus, but with a few interesting twists. Here's what it says.
The history of information technology has always had a bias towards Western languages, and particularly towards English, making it less accessible to those living in other parts of the globe. One of the earliest, most commendable and still ongoing efforts to counter this west-centricity was the formation of the Unicode Consortium, the goal of which is to ensure that the character sets of all modern (and even many no longer spoken) languages can be understood by computers everywhere. (You can read an appreciation of the Unicode Consortium and its work here.)
For those with disabilities, of course, there can be a second layer of challenge to accessing the Web, and all that it can offer, requiring special tools in order to make equal opportunities available to all. As ever with technology, however, new layers of technology continue to be built on top of old ones to accomplish other and/or more sophisticated tasks, requiring that the same type of effort must often be replicated at each successive layer of technology or abstraction. Historically, that has meant that those with accessibility issues often find that just as they begin to achieve a meaningful degree of access to one plateau of technology, the next generation of products reaches the market. Unless existing tools are upgraded or new tools are created, they will at best be relegated to less state of the art platforms, and at worst risk being abandoned as those tools and platforms are no longer supported.
So it is with linguistic accessibility, as not only the Web becomes more truly World-Wide, but the devices able to access it proliferate as well. And some of those tools are (at present) ill equipped to provide equal access to all. For those with disabilities (such as less than perfect vision), the small screens of mobile devices present special challenges: not only can less text be displayed, but the size of that text may also be reduced and the screens may be difficult to navigate. At the same time, experts estimate that the mobile devices may be the primary means of accessing the Web in Third World countries in the future. So where would this leave the visually disable.
Like everything else in the world, military command and control has come to the Web. But with that transition come as many challenges as opportunities, as demonstrated by an article by Brian Robinson at Beltway-based Federal Computer Week's FCW.com, titled DOD arms soldiers, allies with information.
The story focuses on the goals and conclusions of the latest in a series of multi-national testbeds (Multinational Experiment 4 (MNE4)) intended to augment international military collaboration on the battlefield. Success in this type of military collaboration, as with other ventures that rely on the participation of multiple parties, involves a high dependency on standards. One lesson of MNE4, as summarized by MNE4 Technical Lead Maj. Pete Carrabba is this:
Open standards are essential for us to develop our own standards and applications. Proprietary products force us into long-term contracts and provide no flexibility for us to develop according to our needs.
In what can only be called a stunning development in a high profile standards case, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) unanimously reversed the earlier decision of one of its own Administrative Law Judges and ruled that semiconductor technology company Rambus, Inc. had "unlawfully monopolized the markets for four computer memory technologies that have been incorporated into industry standards for dynamic random access memory," or DRAM. The FTC will deliberate further before announcing the penalties to be levied against Rambus.
The FTC decision is only the latest in the series of dramatic reversals that has typified the course of a web of cases filed by Rambus against DRAM manufacturers; by the same manufacturers against Rambus; by antitrust regulators against Rambus; and by the same regulators against the same DRAM manufacturers, charging them with a price fixing conspiracy against Rambus.
This decision is very welcome to me on a personal level as well for two reasons: first, the decision is a vitally important ratification by the FTC of the need to enforce rules of trust in standard setting. And second, because I filed a pro bono "friend of the court" brief on behalf of 12 standard setting organizations (including both consortia and accredited organizations) in support of this outcome. The membership of those organizations totals over 8,600 companies, government agencies and universities, and encompasses a broad range of technologies. I've just received a phone call from lead FTC Complaint Counsel Geoffrey Oliver thanking me and the standard setting organizations in whose name the brief was filed for helping the Commissioners reach this decision, as well as welcoming any suggestions on the penalties that the Commission should impose.