Those of us who live in America are currently in the midst of that most protracted, expensive and (often) tedious of all democratic processes: the quadrennial quest to find, and perhaps even elect, the most able leader to guide the nation into the future. Part and parcel to that spectacle is a seemingly endless torrent of printed words and video. These emanate from more than a dozen candidates, each of whom is trying to convince the electorate that he or she is The One, while at the same time hoping to avoid offering any point of vulnerability that can be exploited by the opposition.
It is an overwhelming and leveling experience for all concerned, electorate and candidates alike.
Out of the campaign cacophony of the last week emerged a handful of words from Senator and Democratic party hopeful Barack Obama that could not fail to catch my attention. He used them during the presidential debate held in Las Vegas, and they also appear in the "Innovation Agenda" that Obama had released a few days before. He announced this agenda in a speech he delivered on November 14 at an aptly selected venue: the Google campus in Mountainview, California. One of the pledges he made in the course of that speech reads in part as follows:
To seize this moment, we have to use technology to open up our democracy. It's no coincidence that one of the most secretive Administrations in history has favored special interests and pursued policies that could not stand up to sunlight. As President, I'll change that. I'll put government data online in universally accessible formats. [emphasis added]
A presidential candidate that is including "universally accessible formats" in his platform? How did that come about?
Wednesday I attended the W3C Technical Plenary Day festivities, which included a brief press conference with Tim Berners-Lee, interesting insights into the W3C's work in progress and future plans, and much more. And it also gave me a chance to sit with Chris Lilley, a W3C employee whose responsibilities include Interaction Domain Leader, Co-Chair W3C SVG Working Group, W3C Graphics Activity Lead and Co-Chair, W3C Hypertext CG. What that combination of titles means is that he is the "go to" guy at W3C to learn what W3C's CDF standard is all about.
CDF is one of the very many useful projects that W3C has been laboring on, but not one that you would have been likely to have heard much about. Until recently, that is, when Gary Edwards, Sam Hiser and Marbux, the management (and perhaps sole remaining members) of the OpenDocument Foundation decided that CDF was the answer to all of the problems that ODF was designed to address. This announcement gave rise to a flurry of press attention that Sam Hiser has collected. As others (such as Rob Weir) have already documented these articles gave the Foundation's position far more attention than it deserved.
About ten days ago I reported that SC 34, the ISO/IEC JTC1 committee responsible for evaluating OOXML, has been unable to make progress on any of its other important initiatives since the OOXML vote. Why? Because the eleven Observer (O) Members that had upgraded to Principal (P) member status in the run up to the OOXML vote have not bothered to cast a vote (even to abstain) ever since. P Members, you may recall, have more influence over the outcome than do O Members.
There is more than one way to look at the voting, of course, and Rick Jelliffe thinks that both sides are equally to blame. I don't think that conclusion can stand up, though, once you really look at the numbers.In the same piece, I observed that this further confirmed the assumptions of those (myself included) that those National Bodies that had upgraded did so solely for the purpose of voting "Yes" for OOXML, as earlier demonstrated by the fact that of the 11 upgrades had in fact done exactly that. What I had not anticipated was that a key standards committee would now be suffering serious collateral damage when these new members have shown no willingness to vote – even to the extend of simply casting an "abstention," which would suffice to meet the requisite 50% participation among P Members for a vote to pass.
While many nations, agencies, cities, U.S. States and other governmental units have considered mandating the use of Open Document Format since Massachusetts announced its intention to do so in August of 2005, comparatively few have actually done so. Now, one of the early and consistent supporters of ODF has taken the plunge, and done so. That nation is the Republic of South Africa.
On Monday of this week, the South African Government released a slightly revised version (4.1) of its Minimum Interoperability Standards (MIOS) for Information Systems in Government, with the most significant amendment being the addition of the ODF requirement. Aslam Raffee, the Chair of the Government IT Officers Council Open Source Software Working Group was kind enough to send me a copy, and you can find the complete text here. The foreword describes the goals of the program, and the way that open standards figure in them, as follows:
The main thrust of the framework (in line with international best practice), is the adoption of a structured approach with regard to information systems. To achieve this approach, and to ensure the enhancement of interoperability across Government, a minimum set of standards are included in this document as a required Government-wide standard. To this end, this updated version of MIOS contains an explicit definition of Open Standards as well as the inclusion of the ISO (International Standards Organisation) Open Document Format.
One of the more egregious behaviors observed in the recent vote on OOXML was the sudden and last minute surge to join not only various National Bodies just before they voted on OOXML, but also the relevant committee of ISO/IEC for the same purpose. At the latter level, not one but two unusual membership changes occurred. During the voting period, more and more countries joined SC 34, the committee within ISO/IEC's Joint Technical Committee 1 (JTC1) that addresses document formats, at the Observer (O) level. Then, in the final weeks and days before the voting closed, many of these new members as well as many longer term members suddenly upgraded their status to Principal ((P) membership, thereby gaining greater influence in the final vote under the complex rules under which the committee operates (those rules are described in detail here).
SC 34 is one of the more important and active committees in JTC1, and has a constant stream of standards under active consideration and balloting. In anticipation of the OOXML vote, its membership surged – with 23 new National Body members, and the number of P members spiking by 11. When almost all of the new members voted for adoption (most of those countries that were long term members voted against adoption, with comments), many felt that the standard setting process had been abused.
But unfortunately, the damage has not stopped there: since the OOXML ballot closed on September 2, not a single ballot has received enough votes to count in this important committee. Why? Because the last minute arrivals to SC 34 are not bothering to vote.
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.)
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.
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.