But perhaps not. One story I've been following in China for some time is the development of China's own home-grown open document format standard, called UOF (for Unified Office Format). Now, two stories involving UOF, OOXML and ODF have appeared in the last ten days in the English language version of the state-owned Xinhua news service that provide an interesting temperature reading on the warmth of the Redmond-Beijing relationship.  (You can read more about UOF here and here.)

The slides are now available for the Chinese standards/open source conference I wrote about on November 8.  The most interesting news I learned there was that China has been actively developing its own open document specification, which it calls Uniform Office  Format (UOF).  You can now see the full UOF case study presentation by WU Zhi-gang here.

The full index of presentations may be found here, and it's worth taking the time to scroll through the various slide sets.  If you do, you will see Chinese perceptions and strategies relating to open standards and open source software developed quite fully by government officials, professors and the development community.  The following excerpts, for example, are taken from a presentation by Guangnan Ni, a member of the China Academy of Engineering.  Note how the points made weave together Chinese strategies as diverse as increasing intellectual property protections for the benefit of local industry rather than simply as a concession to foreign interests, promoting the development of domestic office suites through development and adoption of open document formats, and benefiting domestic industry through the power of government purchasing:

1.  Promoting Legal Copy of the Software is Advantageous to Innovation in Software Industry

In order to promote independent innovation in the software field, China has strengthened the protection of IPR. On April 10, 2006, Chinese four Ministries jointly dispatched a request to all homemade PC manufacturers in China to pre-install legal copy operation systems. It is important to point out that, this action is not simply to reply to foreign requirements of strengthening protection of IPR.

The next basic software to eliminate piracy rapidly may be the Office Suite. Recently, in China the number of people involving in developing Office software may be only fewer than that of US. After the governmental support during the period of 10 th 5 Year Plan, many homemade Offices have realized their breakthrough, such as Evermore Office, WPS Office, Red Office, etc. They have entered the governmental market in big batches.

Last week I was a keynote speaker at a conference in Beijing convened by the Chinese National Institution of Standardization, and learned quite a bit about the objectives and strategies of government and private industry in the PRC for utilizing open standards and open source software.  I'll blog at a later date on many of these topics, but today I'll focus on just one:  the news that the Chinese have developed their own open document format. 

Here's what I learned at the conference, and what I've been able to find out since.  I'll start with the basic details, and then offer a few thoughts on the significance of the news. 

What UOF is:  It's called the Uniform Office Format (UOF), and it's been in development since January of 2002; the first draft was completed in December of last year.  It includes word processing, spreadsheet and presentation modules, and comprises GUI, format and API specifications.   Like both ODF and Office OpenXML, it is another "XML in a Zip file" format. 

Standards wars are not usually considered to be very newsworthy outside of the technical niche in which they occur, but occasionally there's a breakout story that receives much wider attention.  A recent example was the frontal assault of multiple countries directed at wresting control of the root directory of the Internet - a small but very important standard - from the United States.  That skirmish completely monopolized press coverage of the Tunis meeting of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) last November. 

But before that, there was an even higher level confrontation, this time over a close-range wireless networking standard.  That dispute involved the IEEE 802.11 standards family commonly referred to as WiFi, on the one hand, and a Chinese-origin standard called WLAN on the other.  More particularly, it involved a security protocol (called WAPI) included in WLAN that China contends provides superior security protection than does WiFi.

The original WiFi-WAPI conflict arose from the announcement by China that only WAPI-enabled equipment could be sold in the Peoples Republic of China beginning in 2004, which would reverse the situation from one requiring Chinese manufacturers from paying high patent royalties to companies like Intel to one where Western vendors would find themselves in the opposite position.

Publicly, Intel and other chip vendors announced that they would refuse to sell microprocessors in China if the requirement was imposed.  Privately, they headed to Washington for help, since of course they had no desire to lose access to so vast a market.  The dispute worked its way up through diplomatic channels until ultimately then-Secretary of State Colin Powell became involved.  Eventually, China postponed the effectiveness of the home-grown standards requirement.

But what had been  brokered was only a truce, and not a final resolution to the dispute.  Now, that dispute is flaring up again, and it is the Chinese standards delegation this time that is calling in the diplomatic corps to engage with the opposition.

As noted in my post of a few days ago, it was expected that last week's ISO vote on whether to adopt the IEEE WiFi specification or the Chinese WAPI submission would come out in favor of WiFi. As early as Sunday, word began to leak that the vote had in fact favored the IEEE alternative — and decisively so (with 86% in favor of WiFi and only 22% for WAPI). Later in the week, this result was confirmed, and China state forcefully that it would not take the vote as the last word.

Two years ago, a standards war between Wi-Fi and a Chinese standard, WAPI, was averted - but only an interim compromise had been reached. After a number of recent warning signals, it now appears that the truce is over.

A Chinese news source is reporting that the rights to implement its home-grown WAPI standard may now be licensed by anyone - and not just domestic companies - in an effort to push for global adoption of the standard.

A major trade dispute erupted between the United States and China in 2004 over a wireless standard, and then dropped out of sight. Is it about to reemerge?