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:
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.
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.)
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.
[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.
Last fall, I received an email from Adam Kennedy, someone I didn't know at the time, announcing that his company (Phase N, an Australian Perl development shop) was preparing a converter that would enable Microsoft Office users to convert their files into ODF format. He promised to let me know when a press release would be issued making that fact public, which he did. I wrote about that news on October 20 of last year in a blog entry called (Dead Heads take note) If the Thunder Don't Get Ya, then the Lightning Will: Open Source Victoria Opens Back Door to Office.
The press release announcing the development project of the converter (called "OpenOpenOffice" read in part as follows:
Open Source Victoria, Australia's government-funded open source industry cluster, has formed an alliance with Phase N to develop an open source solution to bring Open Document Format capabilities to Microsoft Office users.
Called OpenOpenOffice or O3, it will allow Microsoft Office users to read and write Open Document Format (ODF) files. ODF is the next-generation standard for storing and interchanging office documents such as word processor files, spreadsheets and slide-show presentations. ODF is supported by many of the office productivity suites on the market, including OpenOffice.org, Sun's StarOffice, Corel Office, Abiword, KOffice and others.
Adam and I exchanged a bit of email on and off thereafter, but I hadn't heard from him in awhile until yesterday, when I got an email letting me know that what had been more in the nature of an informal email to Tim Vavarcheck at the Massachusetts Information Technology Division (ITD) had somehow ended up being treated as a formal response to the ITD's RFI, and consequently had been listed at the ITD Website as such.
A week ago, I wrote an entry called ODF, MS and Mass: Now you see the dots (and now you don't). Today I'll look at some more dots, both clearly visible and obscure, and see how many I can identify and connect.
While a quarter-page ad on the editorial page of the Boston Globe costs far less than a $30 million in-kind software donation to Bay State schools and universities, it's a good bet that the ad titled "Working Together Better by Design" that appeared in yesterday's Globe has something to do with last week's generous contribution. Since the ad urges the Massachusetts Information Technology Division (ITD) to adopt Microsoft's Open XML format, then by the transitive property of mathematics (which, as you will recall from middle school, teaches that "if a = b, and b = c, then a = c"), there's a connection between that $30 million donation and the ODF policy of the ITD.
Certainly there's nothing subtle about the goal of yesterday's ad, which concludes:
The promise of interoperability is a vision we share with officials of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. We look forward to the commonwealth's consideration of Open, XML-based format standards as one path toward bridging technical and organizational boundaries and advancing the capabilities of the state's information assets now and in the future. We are committed to working with all of our customers to realize the full potential of information easily exchanged.
The text of the rest of the ad tracks the currently displaying essay at www.Microsoft.com/issues. That essay incorporates many of the corporate talking points that I have noted before, and focuses on the high value of interoperability - and particularly of achieving interoperability "by design," from the beginning of the design cycle. It also notes the recent formation by Microsoft of an Interoperability Customer Executive Council, the importance that Open XML will play in achieving interoperability by design, and Microsoft's submission of Open XML to Ecma.
My topic tonight is a set of RFI responses that surely must be an oxymoronic first: they make fascinating reading(fascinating? RFI responses?). Moreover, they offer the opportunity to go on something of an Easter egg hunt for anyone that wants to pick and prowl through them looking for this surprising bit of information or that, or who wants to weigh what is unsaid (and guess why) as much as to assess what has been claimed, and whether the respondent can actually deliver. Oh - and there's the occasional polemic thrown in as well.
What's all this about? Well, as I reported in early May, the Massachusetts Information Technology Division (ITD) posted a "Request for Information" (RFI), soliciting information on plugins to convert documents created in ODF compliant formats into Office documents. The goal was to find the kind of conversion tools that could ease the ITD's transition of its more than 50,000 desktops from a primarily Microsoft Office-based environment to one that would rely only on ODF-compliant software. Absent such plugins, it would not only be necessary to convert all of those desktops simultaneously, which would be a much larger and more expensive endeavor than doing a more orderly phase-in, but the entire switch-over would need to await adequate accessibility features for the ODF suite chosen for deployment. But with such tools, normal desktop upgrades could be switched over to new desktops preloaded with ODF software, and training on all new programs could proceed in an orderly and efficient fashion.
Yesterday the ITD posted the, six from software vendors - and one from Microsoft.
The six plugin responses make for are an interesting read, and it would be very time consuming to thoroughly report on all of the interesting concepts, suggestions and hints that can be found in them, as well as to highlight the differing conclusions that each submitter offers (for example) on the degree and type of assistance that would be needed from Microsoft. If you're in to such things, you can have quite an Easter egg hunt browsing through what can be found here, how it is presented, and how various developers come out.
First, let’s put the Microsoft grant in context. There is nothing unique about such an action by Microsoft, and many of its competitors make similar donations (here are some examples of programs maintained by IBM and Sun). The generic reason …
In this third in-depth interview focusing on ODF-compliant office productivity suites, I interviewed Erwin Tenhumberg, Sun's Product Marketing Manager, Client Systems Group (Erwin's own blog is called Erwin's StarOffice Tango). This series of interviews, and the other activities I have planned to follow, are intended to illustrate 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. (You can find the previous interview with Inge Wallin of KOffice here, and with Louis Suarez-Potts and John McCreesh of OpenOffice.org here).
Each of these interviews illustrates the unique attributes of each flavor of ODF-compliant software. KOffice is an open source component of the KDE desktop, and thus represents an interesting contrast and alternative to the Office on Windows environment. OpenOffice is also an open source suite, and is the lineal descendant of the code that formed the starting point for the ODF development effort. And StarOffice in many ways is OpenOffice. As you will read below, the same code that represents OpenOffice is utilized in StarOffice as well, which in turn is distinguished by additional value-added features, available support and conversion tools. Like KOffice, StarOffice runs on its developer's operating system — Solaris, representing another alternative to a Windows/Office environment. But unlike MSOffice, StarOffice (and KOffice) will also run on GNU/Linux — and OpenOffice will also run on FreeBSD and Mac OSX.
This series of interviews will include IBM's Workplace as well, which is already in the interview queue. I do not personally have contacts at Google Writely, Abiword, Textmaker or Gnumeric, but if you do — please tell them that I'd be delighted to run an interview with them as well, as the hope is to provide a complete, comparative picture of the entire ODF ecosystem.