Microsoft has just made a major announcement relating to its core products and involving the degree and manner in which it will make the details of those products available to developers. The importance of the announcement was underlined by those that were brought together for the press event at which the decisions were announced: chief executive Steve Ballmer, chief software architect Ray Ozzie, senior vice president of the server and tools business Bob Muglia, and Brad Smith, the senior vice president and general counsel for legal and corporate affairs.
At first glance, this appears to be an important decision by Microsoft indicating a greater willingness to be both open and cooperative. There are a number of promises in the announcement that I like, including the commitment to publish a great deal of material on the Web, as well as the freedom that will be offered to developers to take certain actions without the necessity of first obtaining a license. However, I have not had the opportunity to read any of the supporting details, and those details will be extremely significant, especially as regards the open source community, where subtle differences in legal terms can permit use under some open source licenses, but not others.
Similarly, with respect to ODF, it will be important to see what kind of plug ins are made available, how they may be deployed, and also how effective (or ineffective) those translators may be. If they are not easy for individual Office users to install, or if their results are less than satisfactory, then this promise will sound hopeful but deliver little. I am disappointed that the press release does not, as I read it, indicate that Microsoft will ship Office with a "save to" ODF option already installed. This means that ODF will continue to be virtually the only important document format that Office will not support "out of the box."
If you've always been itching to launch a startup but just couldn't come up with a killer idea, well, your ship is about to come in. No, it won't be quite as good as the Internet Bubble years, when any fool could raise a few million (hell, $30 or $40 million) to sell dog food online - no, really - but not bad, either.
When things are more or less steady state, you have to do something new and original to have a viable business plan in the tech space. But when times and technology really change (one of those paradigm shifty things), then you don't actually have to come up with something new to do at all - you just have to be the first to do something old in a new way. If you look back, that's what 95% of the Bubble companies tried.
True, 95% of those companies also failed. But that's not likely to happen this time around. This time, things will be a lot different, because while the platform is new, almost all of the trial and error on the business models has already occurred, the users are already trained to eat the dog food (as it were), the money is primed to flow, the standards are in place - and here's the really new twist - open source software has made the scene.
The Wall Street Journal reported this morning that EU regulators have announced a third investigation into Microsoft's conduct on the desktop. This latest action demonstrates that while the EU has settled the case against Microsoft that ran for almost a decade, it remains as suspicious as ever regarding the software vendor's conduct, notwithstanding Microsoft's less combative stance in recent years. The news can be found in a story reported by Charles Forelle bylined in Brussells this morning.
According to the Journal, the investigation will focus on whether Microsoft "violated antitrust laws during a struggle last year to ratify its Office software file format as an international standard." The article also says that the regulators are "stepping up scrutiny of the issue." The Journal cites the following as the type of activity it will look into:
In the months and weeks leading up to [last summer's vote on OOXML], Microsoft resellers and other allies joined standards bodies en masse -- helping swell the Italian group, for instance, from a half-dozen members to 85. Opponents said Microsoft stacked committees. People familiar with the matter say EU regulators are now questioning whether Microsoft's actions were illegal. Microsoft said at the time that any committee expansion had the effect of making more voices heard; it also said rival International Business Machines Corp. mobilized on the other side of the vote.
A Microsoft spokesman referred to a statement issued last month, in which the company said it would "cooperate fully" with the EU regulator and was "committed to ensuring" the company is in compliance with EU law.
As many of you are aware, Alex Brown will be the "Convenor" of the OOXML Ballot Resolution Meeting (BRM) that will run from February 25 through 29 in Geneva, Switzerland. Alex has a variety of unenviable tasks, including:
Trying to interpret various standing Directives and other ISO/IEC JTC1 rules and practices that were created for what might be described as kinder, gentler times (not to mention for shorter specifications).
Figuring out how to process c. 1,000 comments (after elimination of duplicates) during a 35 hour meeting week, without the currently contemplated possibility of an extension.
Herding 120 cats, some of which will have strong opinions on individual points, others of which will have alternating suggestions on how to resolve a given point, and many of whom may be just plain bewildered, due to the lack of time to be fully prepared.
For better or worse, the rules that Alex will be interpreting and applying are not as comprehensive, and certainly not as detailed, as the situation might demand to put everyone on exactly the same page regarding what should (or at least could) be done at many points in time. As a result, knowing how Alex's thoughts are shaping up is both interesting and important. To his credit, he has been generous about sharing those thoughts, and often how he arrived at them, at his blog, which can be found here.
While I've often linked to Alex's blog and have had a permanent link in the "Blogs I Read" category for some time, I'd like to point to Alex's latest entry, which covers several important points that others have recently blogged on. In many cases, Alex comes out differently than some others that have stated firm opinions, and since Alex has the gavel, his opinion will be the one that counts.
On Wednesday, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced the most important resolution of a standards-related enforcement action since Rambus, and possibly since its landmark settlement with Dell Computer in 1995. At issue was whether a licensing promise made by a patent-owning participant in a standards development process is binding upon someone that later owns the same patent. In a split 3 – 2 decision, the FTC has ruled that it does, when the later owner exploits the “lock in” of the marketplace by dramatically increasing the cost to license the patent in question.
The decision is significant for a number of reasons. First, the marketplace has long worried over whether such promises can be relied upon in the long term. Second, the sole business of the defendant in the action, Negotiated Data Solutions (N-Data), is licensing patents – in other words, a “troll,” in market parlance. Trolls are viewed by vendors and end users alike as a pernicious and increasing threat.
I was pleased to see the formal announcement yesterday of the OpenSAF Foundation, a new open source project that I've been helping form for the past several months. You can find the the launch press release here, and I've also pasted it in at the end of this blog entry for archival purposes. The Web site for OpenSAF is here.
Here are the high level details, from the press release:
This organization is created to promote the development and adoption of an open source implementation of a high availability base platform middleware based on Service Availability™ Forum Specifications. The OpenSAF Foundation leverages the collective expertise of the telecom and enterprise computing industries to create a best-of-breed implementation. This open source project uses the widely accepted LGPLv2.1 license (Lesser GNU Public License). Membership in the foundation is open to all organizations interested in the development and broad adoption of the OpenSAF code base.
The goals of the OpenSAF Foundation include evolving a broadly adopted base platform middleware not tied to any commercial implementation. This includes support for the SA Forum™ Application Interface Specification and alignment with the requirements of the SCOPE Alliance. Additional services will be developed that may be leveraged by enterprise computing companies, network equipment providers, industries requiring high availability, and independent software vendors.
As you can see, OpenSAF is an implementational chicken to an already existing, open standard egg developed by the Service Availability Forum, as well as a continuing buildout of an important telecommunications system where other organizations (such as the SCOPE Alliance) are already active. The need to create such interdependent organizations working on a collaborative, additive basis is increasingly important in today's converged and expanding, telecom and Internet based world.
If you're reading this blog entry, you've probably been following the battle between ODF and OOXML. If so, you may be thinking of that conflict as a classic standards war, but in fact, it goes much deeper than that label would suggest. What is happening between the proponents of ODF and OOXML is only a skirmish in a bigger battle that involves a fundamental reordering of forces, ideologies, stakeholders, and economics at the interface of society and information technology.
Today, open source software is challenging proprietary models, hundreds of millions of people in emerging societies are choosing their first computer platforms from a range of alternatives, major vendors are converting from product to service strategies, and software as a service is finally coming into its own - to mention only a few of the many forces that are transforming the realities that ruled the IT marketplace for decades. When the dust settles, the alignments and identities of the Great Powers of the IT world will be as different as were the Great Powers of the world at the end of the First World War.
It is in this light that the ODF vs. OOXML struggle should really be seen, and for this reason I've dedicated the latest issue of Standards Today to exploring these added dimensions on the eve of the OOXML Ballot Resolution Meeting that will begin on February 25 in Geneva, Switzerland.
Regulators in the EU today announced that they are opening two new investigations against Microsoft, this time focusing not on peripheral functionalities like media players, but on the core of Microsoft's business: its operating and office suite software. The investigations are in response to a recent complaint filed by Norway browser developer Opera Software ASA and a 2006 complaint brought by the European Committee for Interoperable Systems (ECIS), which includes Microsoft rivals IBM, Nokia, Sun, RealNetworks and Oracle among its members.
Both investigations focus on the benefits that Microsoft gains by combining features, such as search and Windows Live, into its operating system. But the investigation sparked by the Opera complaint also includes some novel and interesting features, based upon Opera's contention that Microsoft's failure to conform Internet Explorer to prevailing open standards puts its competitors at a disadvantage (Opera also asks that either IE not be bundled with Windows, or that other browsers, including its own, should be included as well, with no browser being preset as a default).
The investigations will also look into whether Microsoft has failed to adequately open OOXML, or to take adequate measures to ensure that Office is "sufficiently interoperable" with competing products. This would seem to indicate that Microsoft's strategy of offering OOXML to Ecma, and then ISO/IEC JTC1, may fail to achieve its objective, whether or not OOXML is finally approved as a global standard.
Yesterday, the Linux Foundation posted the first in what will be an ongoing series of podcasts with open source leaders, visionaries and pioneers. The interviews will each be conducted by LF Executive Director Jim Zemlin, and naturally, the first interview is with Linus Torvalds. Appropriately, the series is called, "Open Voices." In this first podcast, Linus shares his thoughts on Life the Open Source Universe, and Everything. Here are a few samples (I'll add more later in this blog entry):
Regarding Linux on the desktop: “The Linux desktop is why I got into Linux in the first place. I have never, ever cared about really anything but the Linux desktop… I don’t worry about the desktop on a technical level because I think that’s the first thing that most kernel developers will really put their efforts in.”
On patent trolls: “Yeah, they’re kind of like the terrorists that you can’t bomb because there’s nothing there to bomb. There are just these individuals that don’t have anything to lose. That breaks the whole cold war model and seems to be one of the reasons that even big companies are now starting to realize that patents and software are a really bad idea.”
Other topics include the Linux development process, including internationalization; the commodization of the desktop; cracking the code for Mobile Linux; GPL3; OpenSolaris, the future of Linux, and much more.
This is the fifth chapter in a real-time eBook writing project I launched and explained in late November. Constructive comments, corrections and suggestions are welcome. All product names used below are registered trademarks of their vendors.
Chapter 5: Open Standards
One of the two articles of faith that Eric Kriss and Peter Quinn embraced in drafting their evolving Enterprise Technical Reference Model (ETRM) was this: products built to "open standards" are more desirable than those that aren't. Superficially, the concept made perfect sense – only buy products that you can mix and match. That way, you can take advantage of both price competition as well as a wide selection of alternative products from multiple vendors, each with its own value-adding features. And if things don't work out, well, you're not locked in, and can swap out the loser and shop for a winner.
But did that make as much sense with routers and software as it did with light bulbs and lamps? And in any event, if this was such a great idea, why hadn't their predecessors been demanding open standards-based products for years? Finally, what exactly was that word "open" supposed to mean?
To answer these questions properly requires a brief hop, skip and jump through the history of standards, from their origins up to the present. And that's what this chapter is about.