I ask you to share with me today the majesty of this moment. In the orderly transfer of power, we celebrate the unity that keeps us free. Each moment in history is a fleeting time, precious and unique. But some stand out as moments of beginning, in which courses are set that shape decades or centuries. This can be such a moment.
When I was much younger, still in school, I was fortunate enough to receive a ticket to a Presidential inauguration. It was a good ticket, allowing me to stand not a hundred yards from the podium where the new president would stand as first he was sworn in, and then as he delivered his inaugural address..
Then, as now, it was a time of uncertainty, with wars both cold and hot raising tensions internationally and inflaming passions at home. The campaign just ended had been divisive, as had the primaries preceding it. There was much to weigh down the shoulders of a new president as he waited to take his oath of office, and many reasons to doubt his ability to deliver on the vision for the future that he would share.
The address that I heard that day was eloquent and high-minded. In it the new President asked:
Vietnam will ring in the Tet New Year on January 26 this year, and 2009 will be the Year of the Buffalo. For government servers, it appears that it will be the year of a few other animals as well, including the GNU and the Firefox.
This, according to Vietnam.net Bridge, which reports that yesterday the Ministry of Information and Communication issued an instruction to the State Agencies of Vietnam to move rapidly to open source software. More specifically, "by June 30, 2009, 100% of servers of IT divisions of government agencies must be installed with open source software; 100% of staffs at these IT divisions must be trained in the use of these software products and at least 50% use them proficiently." According to the article, the instruction is also applicable to provincial and municipal Departments of Information and Communications. By December 31, 70% of these offices must be in compliance.
Specific products mentioned for implementation include the following: OpenOffice, Mozilla ThunderBird and Mozilla FireFox email software, and Vietnam's own Unikey typing software. This would represent the 17th government to throw it's support behind ODF, based upon the count being kept by the ODF Alliance.
Yesterday I filed a pro bono amicus curiae ("friend of the court") brief with the United States Supreme Court in support of the Federal Trade Commission's petition for writ of certiorari in its suit against Rambus Technologies. I'm pleased to report that 19 standard setting organizations (SSOs), representing over 13,300 members, joined as amici curiae supporting this brief; the list of participants appears later in this blog entry. As noted in the brief itself, these SSOs:
...represent a broad range of SSOs that participate in the standard setting process, and each is greatly concerned by the adverse effects that it anticipates will result from the [lower court reversal of the FTC's sanctions of Rambus]. Those effects will reach virtually all aspects of modern society, commerce, education and government, because all of these interests rely heavily upon the efficient development and broad adoption of standards by the private sector.
The pervasiveness of standards, and of the potential reach of the decision on petition, is indicated by the range of focus of the amici curiae that have joined in this brief. They include SSOs that develop standards or support standards development in sectors as diverse as defense, consumer electronics, photography, on-line learning, geospatial information, credit “smart" cards and a broad array of computer system products and services.
In agreeing to be parties to the brief, these organizations demonstrated their concern over maintaining the integrity of the standards development process, as well as their belief that SSOs, their members, and non-members alike must be able to rely upon the support of the courts when they believe that SSO intellectual property rights (IPR) policies have been violated. (I outlined the facts and disputes underlying the Rambus case in this blog entry ten days ago.)
If you haven't already heard the news, long-term kernel developer and pillar of the open source community Ted Ts'o has been named the new Chief Technology Officer of the Linux Foundation. Ted is a great choice for a variety of reasons, one of which is that few people have been knocking around the Linux world longer than Ted - he was the first North American kernel developer (in 1991). And to the left, that's Ted receiving the FSF 2006 Award for the Advancement of Free Software from Richard Stallman.
I first met Ted about five years ago, when I began representing the Free Standards Group, and where Ted and I served as Board members. Ted had been part of FSG's efforts from the beginning, and he has continued to play a major role both at FSG as well as at the Linux Foundation ever since. Besides being present at the creation of the Linux Standards Base and nearly present at the dawn of the Linux kernel, he's also simply a great guy, both to work as well as to have a beer with. Those traits, as well as his technical prowess, will all be even bigger assets for the Linux Foundation in Ted's new role than they have in the past.
As CTO, Ted will lead all technical initiatives, oversee projects such as the ongoing development of the Linux Standard Base (LSB) and the activities of the Open Printing working group, serve as the technical go-between with Foundation members, and also act as the primary inteface between the Foundation and the its Technical Advisory Board, which represents the kernel community.
Long time readers will recall that perhaps the most high-profile (and high emotion) legal dispute involving standards revolves around the conduct of a memory design company called Rambus Incorporated. The emotion arises in part because Rambus develops and licenses technology, but does not actually fabricate semiconductors. This has made its stockholders particularly partisan, as its stock has risen and fallen in synchrony with its fortunes in court, and its detractors particularly irate, because they view Rambus not only as a patent troll, but also as one that has gamed the standards development process during the creation of a universally adopted SDRAM memory standard. Hundreds of millions, and perhaps billions, of dollars of royalties are at stake.
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is one of those that thinks that Rambus gamed the system and deceived the marketplace, and I'm another. That's why the FTC is asking the Supreme Court to overturn a lower court decision and reinstate the FTC's conviction of Rambus, and why I'm filing another in a series of "friend of the court" briefs in support of that goal.
The following piece is taken from the latest (October-November 2008) issue of my eJournal, Standards Today. The issue is titled, A Standards Agenda for the Obama Administration and includes further articles on that topic. For a free subscription to Standards Today, click here.
The goals of the Obama administration are in tune with — but in some technical respects, ahead of — the technological times. As discussed in the Editorial to this issue, unless certain standards-related dependencies are promptly addressed, the timely achievement of the president-elect's innovation and technology policy will be jeopardized. But, as examined in the Feature Article of this issue, the government does not have the historical competency to address these dependencies. What, then, is the new administration to do?
The following is an integrated suite of recommendations that could be implemented quickly and inexpensively, and without Congressional action. Of the ten proposals, the first is most urgent, as the advisors assembled in this step would provide the experience, guidance and active assistance needed to implement the recommendations that follow.
The following piece is the editorial in the latest issue of my eJournal, Standards Today. The issue is titled, A Standards Agenda for the Obama Administration and includes further articles on that topic. For a free subscription to Standards Today, click here.
Barack Obama promises to be the most technologically attuned U.S. president ever. More than a year ago, he released a policy statement on technology and innovation that detailed his plans to employ state of the art technology to pursue a broad spectrum of goals, such as increasing national competitiveness, providing next-generation broadband access for all, creating a "transparent and connected democracy," decreasing health care costs, acting to prevent global warming, and lowering American dependence on foreign oil. In pursuit of these goals, he also promised to appoint the nation's first Chief Technology Officer.
These are worthy and important goals. Like the other commendable promises the president-elect has made, they will be difficult to realize, for reasons both obvious and subtle. The obvious challenges include a crowded and ambitious agenda, the difficulties of achieving political consensus, and above all, the overarching urgency of addressing a global economic meltdown that demands attention above all else.
But there are subtle hurdles that are equally daunting, if less visible. They include the need to develop a multitude of new information and communications technology (ICT) standards in record time, utilizing a standards creation process that is at best loosely coordinated, frequently contentious, and almost completely independent of government influence or control. Moreover, the current standards development infrastructure was never designed to create the suites of closely integrated standards that will be needed to solve the types of complex problems embedded in the Obama technology and innovation agenda. But while the challenge of creating standards-based solutions may be uninteresting from a policy perspective, an inability to perform in this pursuit may present as serious an impediment to success as any failure to secure requisite funding or garner sufficient Congressional support.
Consider just the following examples from the Obama technology and innovation platform:
Certainly the concept of “one citizen, one vote” must be the bedrock upon which all democratic theory and protections are based. Indeed, any government would presumably have to grant the validity of this tenet, lest its own validity be questioned. After all, at the end of the day, when all else is stripped away, the debatable and the subjective, the polemical and the political, is this not the one undeniable standard upon which everyone must agree, the fundamental principle of natural law that philosophers of any persuasion must certainly unite in supporting?
And yet…
Down through the millennia and even into the present, this simple, seemingly irrefutable standard of equality and representative government has proven to be almost impossible to establish in any democracy as a practical fact.
I Among twenty snowy mountains/ The only moving thing/ Was the eye of the black bird.
II I was of three minds/ Like a tree/ In which there are three blackbirds...
V I do not know which to prefer/ The beauty of inflections/ Or the beauty of innuendoes,/ The blackbird whistling/ Or just after...
Wallace Stevens, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, 1917
Although much of the brouhaha of the OOXML adoption process has abated, the post-partum process of reviewing how Joint Technical Committee One (JTC1), the ISO/IEC body that gave birth to both ISO/IEC 26300 (ODF) and OXMLISO/IEC IS 29500 (OOXML), continues. More specifically, meetings continue to be held in which a variety of related matters are being considered, including the ongoing maintenance of each standard, and whether and how the Directives that control the deliberations of JTC1 committees might profitably be amended to address the concerns that arose during the consideration of these two overlapping document format standards.
Most recently, representatives of JTC1 and the SWG Directives committee met in Nara (JTC1) and Osaka (SWG), Japan to review these weighty matters. As has been the case in the past, a variety of those directly involved in the ODF/OOXML saga wrote about the results of this latest meeting, including three bloggers who attended the Ballot Resolution Meeting that served as the climax of the OOXML adoptive process: Alex Brown, Rick Jelliffe and Tim Bray. You can find their alternately contrapuntal and contrary observations here, here and here, respectively. I did not attend the gathering in Nara, but I have read the recommendations made at that meeting (as well as Alex's, Rick's and Tim's commentaries on them), and ruminated a bit on the recommendations and the events that inspired them. Here is my own sense of what others have also observed.
This is the latest in a series of occasional essays that I call The Monday Witness. This series focuses on social rather than technical issues, for the reasons explained in the first entry in the series. As always, the opinions expressed here are mine alone.
If you hail from one of the hot beds of high tech - Silicon Valley, say, or (in my case) the Route 128/495 area of Massachusetts, you've doubtless heard the phrase "serial entrepreneur." What those words describe is someone who has started several companies, and the phrase, when used, is invariably regarded as a compliment. These days, if such a serial entrepreneur has some major successes under her belt, that makes her one of the elite of the high tech nobility - someone with the golden touch, that can turn ideas into huge returns for founders and investors alike.
But should this really be a compliment?
That may sound like a silly question, until you remember that in order to start a new company, you need to get rid of the old one - or at least leave it in someone else's care. That isn't how the great companies of the past came to be what they are today, and it makes me wonder where we can look to find the great companies of tomorrow.