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Briefly noted: Internet governance breakthrough (?) – I guess you had to be there

7/28/2006

A topic I've been following for about a year now is the struggle over "Internet governance," which has translated most directly during that time period into the following question: "will the US Department of Commerce give up control of the root directories of the Internet or won't it?" The debate over that question sadly monopolized the World Summit on the Internet Society (WSIS) for most of the life of that initiative (to date), and promises to continue to do so.

That's a shame, because the WSIS initiative was founded to bring the benefits of information technology and Internet access to all of the peoples of the world. Appropriately, it's administered by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) under the auspices of the United Nations, and if you're interested you can follow what's happened (and hasn't happened) over the past year by scrolling through the news stories, comments and blog entries availalbe in this folder, or by scanning this issue of the Consortium Standards Bulletin.

As you'll see from the materials in either location, ICANN's stewardship of the root directories is up for renewal (or termination) at the end of September of this year. Comments were earlier submitted on what to do when September has run its course, and a public meeting was held two days ago on the question of whether or not to renew the ICANN Memorandum of Understanding, or to put the job out to bid.

According to The Register's Kieren McCarthy, that meeting "should go down in Internet history," as the moment in time when the U.S. government "conceded that it can no longer expect to maintain its position as the ultimate authority over the internet." But the article then goes on to say:

However, assistant commerce secretary John Kneuer, the US official in charge of such matters, also made clear that the US was still determined to keep control of the net's root zone file - at least in the medium-term.

"The historic role that we announced that we were going to preserve is fairly clearly articulated: the technical verification and authorisation of changes to the authoritative root," Kneuer explained....

An XML Language for Emotions?

7/27/2006

The W3C announced the launch of an intriguing new "Incubator Activity" earlier this week that should test the limits to which XML, the lingua franca of all things IT, can be put. The new initiative is called the "Emotion Incubator Group," and its purpose is to take us beyond the narrow range of the emoticon. According to the group's Charter:

The mission of the Emotion Incubator Group, part of the Incubator Activity, is to investigate the prospects of defining a general-purpose Emotion annotation and representation language, which should be usable in a large variety of technological contexts where emotions need to be represented.

That statement also illustrates the range of ways in which those at the cutting edge of standards development are trying to enrich the potential for human-IT interaction, even as they seek to increase the effectiveness of computer-to-computer innovation through Semantic Web standards.

What would an "emotion annotation and representation language" be all about, and is the creation of such a language actually practical? Let's have a look.

ODF Notes and Reports from All Over (Installment VI)

7/24/2006

Last fall, when things were moving quite rapidly in the ODF/OpenXML (then called "Microsoft XML reference schema") front, I did a c. weekly series of blog entries titled as above, pulling together most of what I thought was worth reading from all manner of sources on this topic. Today, there are a number of sites that are fulfilling that function (Bob Sutor's blog is one of the most thoroughly and reliably updated), so I have not felt that this to be as necessary a task as before.

Recently, however, the volume of news and commentary has risen to the point that perhaps there is a need for a new service for those interested in the ODF story: not a gathering, but a winnowing function, selecting those pieces of information, and those analyses, that are particularly worthwhile and shuffling them into some sort of coherently arranged bouquet of contrasting insights. That's what I'll try and do in this entry, and will continue to do on a periodic basis in the future if the chore seems to be worthwhile.

So here goes.

Live’n the WiFi LifeStyle: the iPod Bows to the Router

7/15/2006

Here’s an interesting bit of data from the wild: 8 out of 10 folks that own both an iPod and a wireless router would give up their cool music tool before they'd do without their boring, clunky router. The same percentage of those sampled would also give up their home phone before they'd sacrifice their ability to surf the Web from their favorite couch. The data can be found in a survey conducted by Kelson Research for the WiFi Alliance, the consortium that promotes IEEE WiFi 802.11 standards and, more importantly, certifies compliance with them.

Surprised? Don't be, because the iPod/iTunes system comprises a closed, proprietary environment, while WiFi products are based on a continuously evolving family of open standards, and that makes a far bigger difference than you might think. If this sounds like too simplistic an explanation, consider the following:

Let's look at the numbers first (gross sales and rate of change). What we see is that there are many, many more wireless-enabled devices in the field than there are iPods. According to research analysts In-Stat, wireless chipset sales hit 140 million last year, and should reach 430 million per year in 2009, by which time there should already be over a billion chipsets still in active use. 40 million of the chipsets sold last year found their way into home and small office/home office (SOHO) routers, and another 45 million into laptops and other mobile PCs. That leaves roughly 55 million more to be incorporated into phones and other mobile devices. Moreover, that 140 million number was up 50% from the year before.

In contrast, UBS Investment Research expects iPod sales to come in about a million units under projection this year, with about 39.8 million new iPods being bought in 2006, and a flattening in iPod sales growth after rapid expansion in prior years.

While comparing music players and Internet access numbers is not a totally fair comparison, the ability of WiFi to achieve such dramatically larger sales numbers is still instructive, since few new capabilities of any kind enjoy such explosive growth. When they do, though, its often because they are based on open standards, and from two resulting, related effects: the ability and likelihood of multiple vendors to build new products, because the standard upon which the new products are based is open, and the tempting size of the market demand that can rapidly evolve because of the rich selection of competing products. The result is sometimes referred to as a "virtuous cycle" of incentives and rewards to both sides of the sales equation.

The Microsoft Converter, News Shopping and Tectonic Shifts

7/12/2006

It's been a week now since Microsoft announced its ODF/Office open source converter project — time enough for at least 183 on-line stories to be written, as well as hundreds of blog entries (one expects) and untold numbers of appended comments. Lest all that virtual ink fade silently into obscurity, it seems like a good time to look back and try to figure out What it All Means.

There are two ways to go about that task. One is the "have it your way," news channel technique (simply pick the channel that serves up your daily news just the way you like it, whatever that may be — liberal, conservative or just plain snarky). Nothing better than the Internet for that, where you can go shopping in the great marketplace of interpretation, and willful misinterpretation, that is the Web, and find more than you could imagine. If you do, you won't be disappointed with myriad ways that people have examined the entrails of the converter story to divine (or dictate) wha's up.

For example, there is metaphorical religious conversion theory, from Martin LaMonica:

Redmond has "road to Damascus" open source conversion

And differences of opinion about whether ODF supporters are jumping for joy or expecting the worst:

OpenOffice developers rejoice at Microsoft's OpenDocument Support

ODF guardedly welcomes Microsoft's Office XML move

And, of course, there are plenty of theories about what Microsoft may really be up to. Here's a sampling:

Microsoft Falls Back Again: Announces ODF Plugin Project

7/06/2006

In the latest in a series of concessions to the rising popularity of ODF, Microsoft announced yesterday that it has quietly been supporting the development of its own set of plugins to enable conversion of documents to and from Microsoft Office to software products that support ODF. The news is being treated in the press as "new news," but in fact Ray Ozzie let slip mention of the project last October, and an open source converter project was started by the same French company last September 26. I'll more to say about this below, but first, let's briefly review what the press release has to say.

The new converter tools will be made available under the BSD open source license, and will be made "broadly available to the industry for use with other individual or commercial projects to accelerate document interoperability and expand customer choice between Open XML and other technologies." The tools will also be available as free downloads for use with older versions of Office, and are being created in cooperation with several partners: French IT solution provider Clever Age, and "several independent software vendors, including Aztecsoft in India and Dialogika in Germany." A prototype of the first converter (for MS Word) has already been contributed to an open source project at SourceForge.net.

While Microsoft had previously stated that there was insufficient customer interest in ODF to justify supporting ODF in Office, it explains this partial concession in its press release as follows:

This work is in response to government requests for interoperability with ODF because they work with constituent groups that use that format…"By enabling this translator, we will make both choice and interoperability a more practical option for our customers," said Jean Paoli, general manager of interoperability and XML architecture at Microsoft.

The Emerging ODF Environment, Part IV: Spotlight on SoftMaker Office 2006

7/05/2006

In this fourth in-depth interview focusing on ODF-compliant office productivity suites, I interview Dr. Martin Sommer, SoftMaker Product Manager, of Germany's SoftMaker Software GmbH. Unlike some of the other products profiled so far, SoftMaker Office 2006 currently includes only word processor and spreadsheet functions and is still bringing its product up to full ODF compliance.

While SoftMaker Office is not as well known outside of Germany as KOfiice, another German ODF-compliant software suite, it has a number of interesting and useful unique features, as does each of the other suites that I have featured in this series of interviews. Perhaps most interesting is its availability on mobile devices, and the fact that it has been selected by AMD for bundling with its ambitious "50x15" plan, which hopes to connect 50% of the world population to the Internet by 2015.

And that, of course, is the point of this series of interviews: presenting each competing product in detail illustrates the rich environment of applications and tools that are evolving around the OpenDocument Format (ODF) specification developed by OASIS, and now adopted by ISO/IEC. (The prior interviews can be found as follows: with Inge Wallin of KOffice here, with Louis Suarez-Potts and John McCreesh of OpenOffice.org here, and with Erwin Tenhumburg of StarOffice here.)

OpenOffice.org 2.0.3 Released

7/02/2006

I'm a bit behind in reporting on current events, so this post is by way of a quick cut and paste to update the interview with Louis Suarez-Potts and John McCreech of OpenOffice.org that I posted on May 13 as part of the continuing series on the Evolving ODF Environment. Look for Part IV of that series on July 5, when I post the interview with German software developer SoftMaker on its own ODF-compliant office suite, called SoftMaker Office.

With that as an uncharacteristically brief prelude, here is the text of the email sent out on Thursday (June 29) by OpenOffice.org, announcing their new release of OOo, and describing its new features, fixes, upgrading information and other details:

All

OpenOffice.org 2.0.3 is now ready for download, three months since the release of 2.0.2. This latest release contains a mixture of new features, bug fixes, and security patches, and demonstrates the OpenOffice.org Community's determination to maintain its position as the world's leading open-source office productivity suite.

Pacheco Committee issues Highly Critical Report on Mass. ITD Adoption of ODF

6/30/2006

[Updated: 10:30 ET to add quotes from Globe article]

Those that do not closely follow Massachusetts politics closely (a dismal pastime at best) may remember that State Senator Marc Pacheco, the Chair of the Senate Post Audit and Oversight Committee, held a public hearing last October 31. At that hearing, he called upon then State CIO Peter Quinn, and Linda Hamel, the General Counsel of the State's Information Technology Division (ITD) to testify. During and after their testimony, he was highly critical with respect to the adoption by the ITD of a new Enterprise Technical Reference Model (ETRM), and in particular of the requirement under the ETRM that the Executive Agencies use only ODF-compliant office productivity software after January 1, 2007. He also called a number of witnesses to address the Committee that were uniformly hostile to the new policy (rejecting the offers of supporters to testify), and announced that his committee would commence an investigation into the facts underlying his concerns.

Senator Pacheco's committee has now completed it's investigation of the situation, and has issued a 31 page, small type, single-spaced written report that is… (again) highly critical of the State's Information Technology Division (ITD) with respect to its adoption of a new Enterprise Technical Reference Model (ETRM), and in particular of the requirement under the ETRM that the Executive Agencies use only ODF-compliant office productivity software after January 1, 2007. On an initial scan, it is difficult to find a part of the report that is not consistent with the allegations and conclusions expressed at the hearing eight months before. The title also suggests both the tone and the conclusions of the effort: Open Standards, Closed Government.

The report was issued at a press conference held at the state house at 2:00 PM Thursday afternoon, and is not as yet available on line. Only a limited number of print copies were made available (to the press), but I was able to obtain an imaged copy by email late this evening. As of this moment in time, there is only one news article available on line, which can be found here (the article was written by Martin LaMonica, who is local and I expect attended the press conference). [The report has now been posted, and can be found at the Mass.gov site.

Who Should Govern the Internet (Act II)

6/28/2006

For some time I have been covering the topic of Internet Governance, both in the macro (and more meaningful) sense of ensuring that both the Internet and the Web fulfill the incredible promise that they hold for the advancement of all humanity everywhere, as well as in the micro, and more political sense of who should control the root directories of the Internet - a more symbolic than substantive question of control.

My most detailed coverage can be found in the November 2005 issue of the Consortium Standards Bulletin, titled WSIS and the Governance of the Internet, which I wrote in the run up to the second plenary meeting, and closing event of the second phase of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), an ambitious initiative launched by the United Nations and administered by the ITU to to bridge the digital divide between the haves and the have-nots.

That second meeting was held in Tunis, Tunisia, and was overshadowed by the ongoing political spat over who should control the root directories of the Internet - small databases that include the two letter national identifiers that end domain names and help direct Internet traffic to the appropriate geographical target. Currently, those domains are under the control of ICANN, which is in turn empowered to administer the directories under a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with National Telecommuncations and Information Administration, a branch of of the United States Department of Commerce.

That subjection of a vital, if small, element of the Internet infrastructure to the control of a single nation achieved increasing significance as the Bush administration adopted an increasingly "go it alone" attitude in the post-9/11 world, and the political brouhaha that built up over the issue after the Department of Commerce announced in the summer before the Tunis summit that it would not, as earlier promised, relinquish control of the root directories built into a resounding crescendo that opershadowed, and indeed overpowered, any real progress that might otherwise have been accomplished at Tunis.

The upshot was that the opposition caved to the U.S. on the eve of the summit, taking away as a sop the formation of a new Working Group on Internet Governance, which is now in formation, leaving control of the root directories in U.S. hands.

Now, however, another time-sensitive event is looming: the expiration of the MOU itself, opening the door for debate over whether ICANN itself should remain the indirect custodian of the root domains (the domains are actually administered by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, or IANA), or whether the contract should be turned over to another contractor (if you'd like to know the full details of how things operate, see the Feature Article from the September CSB, titled WSIS, ICANN and the Future of the Internet).

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