On February 29, about an hour after the OOXML Ballot Resolution Meeting closed, I posted this blog entry, based on information available at the time. Corrections were made over the next two days to take further information into account as it became available; those corrections are duly noted in the text. Due to the extent and energy of the debate that has erupted around the BRM, I turned that blog entry into an ongoing resource page, adding first-hand accounts of many delegates to the BRM, the views of selected non-attendees, the text of public statements and press releases by ISO/IEC JTC1, Ecma, various National Bodies and other interested parties, and more.
In order to make that material easier to use, I've now moved that material to this new entry, reorganized it, and added the Table of Contents immediately below (the original blog entry, as corrected, now stands alone at the original date of posting, with a forward link to this resource page). You can also view the many press articles that continue to be written as I add them to the News Picks column to the right, as well as hundreds of additional articles from the past several years about ODF and OOXML, by bookmarking . You can therefore stay current on further developments and statements relating to the BRM by bookmarking this blog entry.
My thanks to all of you that have pointed me to much of the data that appears below. Please continue to send me links to information as you find it or provide it, and I'll add it below. NOTE: you must click through to the full text of this entry for some of the Table of Contents links to work
Table of Contents
I. Updated Blog Entry - As posted on February 29
II. Comments to Blog Entry - Includes an extensive exchange with BRM Convenor Alex Brown
III. Daily Updates - Supplemental notes on the materials as added
IV. BRM Accounts by Delegates (interested and neutral) - Blog postings and interviews of delegates with their details and perspectives
V. BRM Commentary by Others - Both interested and neutral; for press accounts, see the ODF/OOXML News folder
VI. Public Statements and Press Releases - ISO/IEC JTC1, Ecma, National Bodies, and more
In his later years, the American Jazz Age author F. Scott Fitzgerald ruefully observed that "There are no second acts in American Lives." That now-famous verdict was based upon the personal experience of the once celebrated author, by then a self-described "Hollywood Hack," reduced to writing B Movie scripts for current income.
If there is a current exception to Fitzgerald's axiom in the world of technology, it must certainly be Steve Jobs. The company he founded in a garage with partner Steve Wozniak quickly seized the lead in the PC revolution, reaching $100 million in revenues by 1980. Later the same year, Apple launched the largest IPO since Ford Motor Company went public. But the introduction of the IBM PC and the rise of Microsoft wrought a reversal in Apple's fortunes, and in May of 1985, the man he had recruited to be his mentor ousted Jobs from his own company.
The rest, of course, is the stuff of which legends are made. Jobs attempted to vindicate his vision in 1985 by founding a new company that he unsubtly dubbed NeXT Computer. But NeXT never found its market: by 1993, it had sold only c. 50,000 machines. Then, at last, Jobs' fortunes began to improve.
In 1996, NeXT was acquired by Apple, which had itself been largely wandering in the wilderness during the intervening years. By acquiring NexT, Apple not only obtained the rights to a new operating system, but it reacquired Jobs as well. Moreover, not long after leaving Apple, Jobs had bought an animation studio from LucasFilms for $5 million, plus a $5 million cash infusion into the studio itself. He later renamed that studio Pixar, and it went on to become wildly successful, making Jobs a very wealthy man twice over.
With the fantastic success of the iPod and iTunes, the successful launch of the tectonically innovative iPhone and the rejuvenation of Mac sales, Jobs now seems poised on the cusp of proving Fitzgerald wrong to the point of stomping on the author's grave. But will he in fact pull it off, leading Apple to dominate the mobile platform of the future after surrendering the emerging PC platform of the past to his rivals?
Given Jobs' announcements of yesterday, I'm afraid that history may be about to repeat itself instead. Here's why.
I have now created a very extensive, indexed BRM Resource Page to hold the many links, press releases, delegate statements and other material that were originally found here. You can find that extra materials here.
A rather incredible week in Geneva has just ended, bringing to a close the Herculean task assumed by the over 100 delegates from 32 countries that attended the BRM. That challenge, of course, was how to productively resolve the more than 1,100 comments (after elimination of duplicates) registered by the 87 National Bodies that voted last summer with respect to a specification that itself exceeded 6,000 pages.
I have spent the week in Geneva, and have spoken with many delegates from many delegations on a daily basis. Each believed that a body that purports to issue "global open standards" should not impose an obligation of secrecy on how the standards that people must live with are approved on their behalf. It would be fair to say that, notwithstanding all of the charges and counter charges that have been made leading up to the BRM regarding how National Body votes were taken last summer, how delegations have been selected, and how they have been instructed to act and vote at the BRM, there has been a good faith effort by all to try to achieve a successful result. The same appears to have held true within delegations, even those that contained representatives of the most opposed parties.
There are two ways in which you may hear the results of the BRM summarized by those that issue statements and press releases in the days to come. Perhaps inevitably, they are diametrically opposed, as has so often happened in the ODF - OOXML saga to date. Those results are as follows:
98.4% of the OOXML Proposed Dispositions were approved by a three to two majority at the BRM, validating OOXML
The OOXML Proposed Dispositions were overwhelmingly rejected by the delegations in attendance at the BRM, indicating the inability of OOXML to be adequately addressed within the "Fast Track" process
[Paragraph updated] In this blog entry, I will explain why the following is the best characterization, and help you read the various press releases and statements that may be made with the benefit of the appropriate context:
Only a very small percentage of the proposed dispositions were discussed in detail, amended and approved by the delegations in attendance at the BRM, indicating the inability of OOXML to be adequately addressed within the "Fast Track" process
This rather long essay is in one sense a reply to the open letter recently released by Patrick Durusau, in which he suggested that it was time to acknowledge progress made and adopt OOXML. But it is also an explanation of why I have for the first time in my career become personally involved in supporting a standard. The reason is that I believe that we are at a watershed in public standards policy, and that there is much more at stake than ODF and OOXML. In this essay, I explain why I think we need to recognize the existence and vital importance of what I call “Civil ICT Standards,” and why more than simple technical compromises are needed to create them in order to protect our “Civil ICT Rights.”
As I write this entry, hundreds of people from around the world are converging on Geneva, Switzerland. 120 will meet behind closed doors to hold the final collaborative discussions that will determine whether OOXML will become an ISO/IEC standard. When their work is complete, not everyone will be pleased with the changes agreed upon, but all will acknowledge that the specification that eventually emerges will be much improved from the version that was originally submitted to Ecma two years ago.
Most will also agree that Microsoft’s customers and independent software vendors (ISVs) will be far better off with OOXML publicly available than they would if Microsoft had not offered the specification up at all.
To reach this final draft, hundreds of standards professionals in many nations have spent a great deal of time and effort, including many at Microsoft. And while Microsoft, working with Ecma, has not agreed to all of the changes that have been requested, my impression is that it has agreed to many that will, if implemented by Microsoft, require a substantial amount of work and technical compromise on its part.
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.