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.
Military tacticians often bewail the havoc that the "fog of war" (i.e., the inability to communicate effectively amid the chaos of the battlefield) wreaks on their carefully laid plans. I sometimes feel the same way about the challenge of maintaining a productive dialogue in highly competitive standards situations. When the commercial stakes begin to rise, there too often seems to be a greater desire to exchange verbal salvos than to actually communicate. And it also becomes more tempting to be content with generalizations than to try to get to the bottom of things to figure out what's really going on.
About 10 days ago I tried to do a bit of fog cutting by posing a few questions at Jason Matusow's blog at the end of a post he had titled Independent Implementations of Open XML. Jason does a conscientious job of trying to answer all of the questions that people leave at his blog, including those that are not exactly what you'd call polite. In this case, Jason had listed six implementations of OOXML, supplying the usual links to the sites of the vendors in question.
What I wanted to get to the bottom of in this case was what exactly these implementations were trying to accomplish. ODF advocates like to focus on not only the potential for ODF to be used as the basis for office productivity suite implementations, but on the reality that such suites have actually been produced. They also like to point out that there are no such suites implementing OOXML, other than Office itself, although there are products (such as Novell's OpenOffice implementation) that can save to the OOXML format. And to be fair, Microsoft has consistently said that OOXML and ODF were created for two entirely different purposes. So I was curious to learn to what purposes these implementations were intended.
Does the nature of those purposes really matter? Yes, I think that it does. But before exploring that statement further, let's take a look at the questions that I asked at Jason's blog, and how the thread developed from that point forward.
In what the New York Times is calling a "stinging rebuke," the European Court of First Instance issued a much-awaited judgment at 9:30 AM today in Luxembourg affirming almost all of the March 23, 2004 holdings by the European Commission that Microsoft had abused its dominant position to further expand its market share. The Court also affirmed the remedies against Microsoft, including fines of approximately US $1 billion. Only those parts of the original decision that would appointed a trustee to monitor Microsoft's compliance with the EU's orders were rejected, as exceeding the powers of the Commission. But while the victory is a significant one for the European Commission, how great a defeat is this in fact for Microsoft? Perhaps less than first meets the eye, on which more below.
Today's decision is but the latest event in an almost 10 year history of investigations, trials, appeals, and new allegations that initially focused only on Microsoft's activities involving server software, but eventually grew to involve allegations of abuses in the office software marketplace as well. All of these accusations involved contentions that Microsoft was limiting the ability of its competitors to create products that would interoperate with its own, thus further entrenching itself. With time, open source advocates and trade associations filed lodged complaints as well, as Linux gained market share and greater vendor interest, and OpenDocument Format (ODF) compliant products, such as OpenOffice, gained greater credibility.
In the decision announced today, the Court found that Microsoft had abused its dominant market through two types of conduct, and ordered Microsoft to remedy the situation as follows:
That's the title of a press release issued yesterday by the Linux Foundation (the full text, as usual, also appears below). Given the number of conferences that are being held on open source licensing issues all the time, you might understandably wonder why LF feels it's necessary to have two more. In fact, there are some pretty good reasons, and hence this blog entry.
One reason is that most open source conferences are organized by and for lawyers, and concern themselves with the arcana of licensing, offering an infinite number of rat holes to disappear down, but not much opportunity to look for solutions, talk about strategy and get creative. Another is the fact that many of those that set up and speak at such conferences love to hang out the crepe and focus on gloom and doom. A classic example held under the auspices of the AILPA (the American Intellectual Property Law Association) in August of this year was alarmingly titled The new GNU General Public License – A Direct Attack on Software Patents and Patent Licensing? (most of the organizers and speakers shared a certain common affiliation).
After all, it's good for business when you're a lawyer to make everyone think that absent high-priced counsel and careful legal supervision, your business will surely evaporate before your eyes. All too many of the topics that get talked about at such affairs are intended to perform the purpose of what we used to call an "Oh No! article in our firm newsletter – a story about a common mistake clients make, and that would therefore be likely to inspire a predictable number of readers to pick up the phone and give us a call.
Yesterday, OpenOffice.org announced that IBM would become a formal – and substantial - contributor to that organization. IBM's contributions will include 35 dedicated programmers as well as editing, accessibility, and other code that it has developed for its ODF compliant products. The OpenOffice.org press release was brief, as was an FAQ that was only available at the OpenOffice site for a few hours. As a result, I got in touch with IBM to see if I could interview someone to learn more, and was able to spend a half an hour on the phone with Doug Heintzman later the same day. Doug is Director of Strategy for the Lotus division at IBM, and therefore in the know about how the decision was made, and what the future may hold (Notes, with over 100 million global users, implements ODF).
As I noted yesterday, IBM's joining OpenOffice.org is significant news, because it boosts ODF's credibility as a serious competitor to Microsoft's Office. That leads to the logical question of why IBM has only been an informal supporter of this project in the past, why it has decided to come inside the tent now, and what its participation may portend for the future. I posed, and Doug answered, these and other questions in the interview. Please note that while the interview is presented below as questions and answers, this is not a word for word record (I can't type quite that fast). What I show as Doug's responses are therefore close to verbatim some of the time, and paraphrases in others. Since Doug has not corrected the final result, these answers should therefore not be considered to be direct quotes.
Updated 9/11/07: I conducted an in-depth interview later on Monday with IBM's Doug Heintzman on why IBM decided to join OpenOffice.org at this time, and what it hopes to accomplish, which you can find here.
In what many will see as a long-overdue move, OpenOffice.org announced today that IBM will become an active supporter of, and contributor to, OpenOffice. That suite is the most widely used office productivity suite that implements the OpenDocument Format (ODF). It is also free, and based upon source code originally published as open source in 2000 by Sun Microsystems under the LPGL license. The OpenOffice.org project has been actively developing the code since 2003, largely with the economic support of Sun Microsystems, which sells a business-oriented, supported version of the same suite called StarOffice. OpenOffice-org reports that more than 100 million copies of OpenOffice have been downloaded.
According to a press release issued this morning by OpenOffice.org, the open source project that maintains OpenOffice (the full text is reproduced at the end of this blog entry as well), the nature of IBM's support and contributions will be as follows:
IBM will be making initial code contributions that it has been developing as part of its Lotus Notes product, including accessibility enhancements, and will be making ongoing contributions to the feature richness and code quality of OpenOffice.org. Besides working with the community on the free productivity suite's software, IBM will also leverage OpenOffice.org technology in its products.
The question that many will be asking is this: What took so long? That's a query upon which many have speculated, but which no one has ever definitively answered. I'll return to it later, but first, here's more on the announcement itself, and why it's so significant.
While many of us have been preoccupied with the OOXML vote, the rest of the world has naturally been continuing to go about its business. One piece of business that took an interesting turn in the last few days is a ruling by a Federal Appellate Court in the United States that breaks new ground in protecting the integrity of the standard setting system. The ruling may also have relevance to the regrettable conduct witnessed in the recent OOXML vote.
What happened
The ruling was handed down by the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit, in one of the multiple, ongoing suits between Qualcomm Incorporated and Broadcom Corporation, involving the vast and lucrative market for next generation wireless telephones and related services. The litigation history to date is complex, so for current purposes I'll focus only on the central contention and related holdings that are of interest to the standards process, rather than on how the ruling fits into the past and future fortunes of the parties to the litigation.
Updated (twice): 9:30 AM and 2:30 PM
Last night, I projected that the OOXML vote in ISO/IEC JTC1 would fail (the New York Times predicted the opposite). I have now seen the official vote tally, and confirmed that the vote failed both tests for approval (details are included at the end of this blog entry). The official ISO announcement is here.
Microsoft issued a press release early this morning, seeking to put the best face on the OOXML in advance of the official announcement by ISO. The release is titled Strong Global Support for Open XML as It Enters Final Phase of ISO Standards Process, and subtitled, "Significant participation by National Bodies in ISO/IEC ratification process for Open XML; final decision expected in March 2008 at close of ballot resolution period."
The release focuses on the degree of participation (51 National Bodies), and level of "support" (74% of all qualified votes, without differentiating between P and O countries). It also refers to this level of support at "this preliminary stage of the process," and compares it "favorably" to the number of countries participating in the votes to consider ODF and PDF, but without mentioning percentage levels of support: the OpenDocument Format received a total of 31 votes - all to approve. Moreover, there were so few comments offered along with those votes that no Ballot Resolution Meeting was required.
The Microsoft press release tries to draw good news from the level of participation in the OOXML vote, stating perhaps more accurately than intended (out of 41 P members, 24 voted either against approval, or abstained) as follows:
This widespread participation and support is consistent with the rapid adoption of the Ecma Office Open XML file formats across multiple platforms and products from a wide range of IT vendors (including Apple, Novell, Corel, Sun, Microsoft, Java developers and Linux distributors), creating real value for IT users around the globe.
More tellingly, the cornerstone quote from Microsoft's Tom Robertson reads in part as follows,surely placing it in the running for winner of the "Pony in the Pile" award for today: