Moved by Freedom - Powered by Standards

Dear readers,

I would first like to wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. 2008 will be exciting, but most of you already know it.

Today I would like to tell you about something I have discussed here and on several other places, such as mailing lists. It is a key issue as it relates both to the topic of open standards, format adoption, and FOSS. It is intensely political, but also has some very real implications. This article by Bruce Byfield prompted me to discuss these matters in a more detailed fashion.

What is this all about? The Gnome Foundation’s behaviour in front of the OOXML controversy. I don’t think there is any need to remind my audience on what happened with the Gnome Foundation (the article above will summarize things well). Suffice to say, Novell and/or ex-Novell developers have been assisting to the Ecma TC 45 (the one on OOXML) and been “supportive” of OOXML in general. I am aware that I’m making a very long story short here. But I’m doing this on purpose: the conspiracy that Bruce refers could be summarized as Novell engineers hijacking Gnome to serve their own corporate needs, and the problem is, these needs are aligned with the ones of Microsoft.

That is one perception of the story. I am not saying it is true, at least not at the moment.  Yet it is shared by the greatest part of the community, at least the one that has heard of that story. I am a bit surprized by Bruce’s opinion. His take on the subject is that although one doesn’t have to be an OOXML fan, there is no reason why we should be pragmatical. This kind of argument is something I have witnessed ever since the agreement between Novell and Microsoft have been signed. It has been floating in the general buzz and you find it everywhere where Novell goes. You have to be pragmatic. Not idealistic. You’re in the business. In this industry. Sure, you’re selling Open Source (how can we sell that is a different story, entirely), but you’re reasonable. And above all, you serve your customers first and give them what they want.

How to make a FOSS developer swallow that he’s indeed working for Microsoft

I have noticed that there is some kind of snobism being expressed by several developers in regard of non-developers. Most of this is usually expressed along the good old lines of the cognoscenti versus the ignoranti (the non developers, the laymen). What I find interesting is that -talking about OpenOffice.org- this kind of behaviour is usually found with some Novell developers. I’m not throwing mud at Novell here, I’m talking characters and persons. If they feel it’s an ad hominem attack, so long for them, I have no time to lose. Their speech and what they implicitly state can be broken into several constant and well-identified parts:

- We are software engineers. We are in the know. You are not

- We know how to code. You don’t. We are wizards to you

- We do not care about politics. We are solely absorbed by our art.

- Anything else out of the code is blatantly insignificant.

On a psychological point of view , one could have many things to say. The code is sacred, and we have the knowledge. We instigate ourselves as the rulers of the community through our sheer power we have gained through our knowledge. We shall rule the community (a polite word for this is “meritocracy”).

There are however several problems with that. The first one is that this kind of behaviour not only frustrates non coders, but it also ignores a deep reality of Free Software communities: Users have as much right as developers have, and non-developers can contribute as well, sometimes in ways that are more important than code, as code in itself can often, if not always, be a commodity.

The second problem is more subtle  and is directly related with the OOXML controversy. You can flatter developers with this kind of opinions, and it will be easy for them to forget about those damned “politics”. For instance, I was very surprized one day when I asked -politely-  a question about wether OpenOffice.org should move to a different license, such as, for instance, the (L)GPL v3. All of a sudden several developers -all Novell employees- jumped on me and started to explain that 1° this was all politics 2° I was bringing this topic just to bother them. I was surprized because to this day I still do not understand why this could have been a problem. There needs to be a deep and meaningful conversation about moving to the (L)GPL v3 to be sure, but not one where Novell or, more simply, engineers should feel bothered or cricitized. After all, it’s their software too.

Hence, we could think of a group of developers whose egos would be flattered and petted so nicely they’d start to think they are half-gods on the Earth and who would, because of how professional they are, leave the discussion on politics and law to the specialists, because they are reasonable.  The point of course would be to know who these specialists would be working for. I do hear very well that developers are not lawyers, and that lawyers not developers. So you need to ask specialists sometimes. That does sound obvious to me. But there’s a difference between good sense and good rethoric. I think that’s how the problem with Gnome, OOXML and some employees or ex-employees of Novell started.

Formats and Network effects

It is not necessary at this point to tell the story of Microsoft Office and how it became ubiquitous. But it may be worth explaining how network effects work in the realm of office suites.

Take three office suites: A office, B office, and C office. A office is that very successful office suite everyone has come to love and use; everyone, that is, the people working in the office. A office is in some sense an entreprise software.  B office is a less-known office suite, with a smaller market share. C office is the underdog. Each office suite uses its own format, format A for A office, B for B office, C for C office. At this stage, conversion and exchange of documents between those three office suites are very difficult, and only can only work between users of the same product.Needless to say, formats A, B and C are completely closed and non standard.

Now watch this: B office strikes a major deal with 5 of the largest PC manufacturers and will be pre-installed on every computer sold by any of those 5 vendors. People soon find out that they have an office suite, that it’s not as bad as it may seem in comparison of A office. B office has some good converters, so transition is easier than expected. By striking this deal, B office gains a much larger user base than A office in a short period of time. But there’s more: as more and more people buy PCs, the format B becomes used more and more and every day. At some point, users of A office and C office are being requested that they should use format B for convenience. Unfortunately for them, the benefits that come with using A or C office are vanishing quickly, and many of A or C office customers are switching to B office because it becomes harder to use A or C office, harder to use because of the formats, and harder to purchase. Now we reach a stage where C office is on the verge of going bankrupt. They take the decision to support format B in the hope that customers will go back to them and that they will be able to benefit from the network effect of B office. Problem is, format B is closed, and C office developers have to reverse-engineer format B, releasing a pretty good, but flawed and crippled conversion filter for C office. Result: C office buys a bit more oxygen, but dies two years afterwards, without anybody noticing. Meanwhile, A office refuses to adopt format B and extends its features set by integrating new software that does not belong to an office suite, while changing its distribution channels. The network effect though, still plays against A office and it is forced, under customer pressure, to implement a conversion filter with format B. The result is that A office moves up the applications stack and becomes a different product, like a mail and calendar server,  a PIM, or even a application server. But it ceases to exist as a meaningful office suite alternative on the market in a short period of time. That is roughly how network effects work in the business of office suites. The most important lesson of this is that what matters is the format, not the application. The format creates the network effect and captures users, unless it is open and standard. Now, I think Gnome and Novell developers (aside perhaps Miguel De Icaza), the Noooxml web site, the boycottnovell.com web site and myself can respectuously agree on one point: OOXML is neither open, nor standard. Thus, we should not be helping it in anyway, I could add. But here’s the catch:

You have to be reasonable.  Microsoft dominance on the office suite market is such that you cannot avoid them. Hence, we are developing OOXML plugins and an export filter for our own version of OpenOffice.org. 

Does this make sense to you? It does to me, but there is a syllogism in the propositions above. I agree with being reasonable, although I don’t know what it means in this context. I agree with the reality of Microsoft dominance on the office suite market (hey, everyone does) but I don’t agree with the last sentence, neither with the project, nor with the apparently logical relationship between Microsoft dominance and the project. What this means is that you are effectively extending Microsoft’s grip on the office suite market simply by extending the use and the reach of their new format.

Resistance is futile!

Where this story becomes wild is when you consider the timing of OOXML and the development of plugins and converters. It should perhaps be important to remind my readers that to this day, MS/Ecma/whoever OOXML is not an ISO standard. In fact, it’s far to be one, and major modifications could amend its specification. That’s the unfortunate and often overlooked part of the story: some developers have been rushing to extend the reach of a closed and half-finished format before it was even adopted by the users of its main implementation. And there one may wonder if it wasn’t in a sense a very good deal for Free Software and Open Standards. By being proactive, the Novell team is gaining skills and understanding of the format beforehand.

I think this argument is actually quite pernicious. First, they will not gain any understanding of anything if Microsoft decides not to use OOXML (amended, post BRM, 2008 version) in MS Office 2007. If you think it would be a foolish option, then I suggest you ask Microsoft how they managed to implement both an XML and a closed , binary format for Excel 2007 bearing the same extension. And if you’re a lawyer, it will not take you long to realize that Microsoft has no obligation to use OOXML in MS Office or any of its products. Actually, that stands true for any format, standard or not standard. Second, the theory according to which you can cooperate with your ennemy in order to avoid confrontation works sometimes and only to a certain point. I have seen some critics of OpenOffice.org explaining that OpenOffice.org was not being legally covered by the Sun-MS covenant. It’s actually being protected by the OIN, of which my company is a licensee, but that’s not the question. Now think about this: Novell does interact and could/has/may use Microsoft’s IP when working on the export filters to OOXML for OpenOffice.org. On a legal point of view, nothing could stop Microsoft to sue OpenOffice.org if it ever was to use the OOXML export filter developed by Novell…. unless you use the Novell edition of OpenOffice.org.  Now how good is the argument about cooperating with your ennemy?

So why does one even bother with OOXML? That’s the question Jody Goldberg, Miguel de Icaza and some others should answer to. And I hope this time it will be better than “a technical interest in the matter”. My take on this is actually very simple and actually quite reasonable: It’s all about money and business. Surprized?

There shall be no middleground

Bruce Byfield’s article emphasizes on the Gnome Foundation’s involvement in this  controversy. I think it would be inaccurate and unfair to the Gnome Foundation to claim it has sided with the OOXML camp or anything of this kind. It would be factually wrong, and would hurt the feelings of hundreds of contributors. In this, Bruce is right to balance what has been heard here and there, but perhaps Bruce could have read the fineprint better: what I’ve read on the websites he qualifies to be “cherry picking” does cast doubt on some members of the Gnome project, not so much on the Foundation itself.

The Gnome Foundation is composed of many developers from large or small corporations that are either hostile or simply indifferent to OOXML. What may have happened was flamewars that ended up in a pretty ugly way, as flamewars always do. I think we will never know how Novell employees and an ex-Novell employee managed to lure Gnome into the Ecma. Jeff Waugh seems to be a perfectly reasonable gentleman who may have been in the unfortunate position of listening too much to some of its contributors. Aside of that, Jeff clearly expressed that the Gnome Foundation does not endorse and will not endorse in any way OOXML. That being said, this is Free Software, and if some still want to try to implement OOXML, that’s their choice.

Bruce’s article states several time the need of finding a common ground. I agree with him once again that there should be a reconciliation with the Gnome Foundation. But there will be no reconcilation possible with the backers of OOXML. I would even point out that there is no need for that. Why, for instance, should the Gnome Foundation sponsor Jody’s participation to the Ecma? What good does it do to Gnome and to Free Software in general?

Open Standards can be a very complex topic, but there is one thing that, despite many discussions, shall remain clear: You cannot be a little open, and a little standard. More exactly, a standard is either an ISO standard or not an ISO standard. Although several definitions have been given for an open standard and several others will appear in the future, openness can always be measured in terms of lack of barriers. To this day, OOXML is neither standard, and far to be open. The fake common sense argument that makes a partly published specification an “open” specification has lured many into believing half-truths, but since then many have realized how closed and incomplete it was. Apparently some would still like us to believe OOXML is an open standard. Make no mistake, OOXML is not an open standard, just like Christmas is not Easter.

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- “Microsoft denied on Friday antitrust claims from Opera Software that the software giant is abusing its dominant market position to lock users into the Internet Explorer Web browser.” I love this sentence. 

- It’s been a long time I haven’t talked about OpenOffice.org. Some news: OpenOffice.org released the bug-fixing 2.3.1 recently. Grab it here.

- There will be an PDF Import feature in the coming OpenOffice.org versions. More details here, and some architectorial points there. No passwords needed, I swear.

- Facebook  opens up. But to me, and to others, the most important issue that seemed to be completely forgotten is the perennity of the data (the social and personal data) around whose social networks, may they be powered by Facebook or by Open Social. Clearly it’s time to effectively implement the Charter on personal data, which will require some work on formats and their standardization.

- Netherlands! choose! OpenDocument Format!  What?  Ah, I almost forgot: Send in the Microsoft lobbyists. (Which means this: these news are of course temporary. Expect flying Stevie to come back to Europe very soon).

And of course, don’t forget: it’s Christmas shopping time everyone!

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 The Ecma is now advertizing the major changes they’re proposing through their answers and that does indeed sound good. I and others would even like to congratulate them if it weren’t for the complete opacity of the process and the fact that, despite what the Ecma and Microsoft claim, many of us, members of national standardization bodies, haven’t yet been able to gain access to the answers of the comments. We are for the moment left at guessing, and others than I already did this quite well; see here and here.  I am however still puzzled at the absolute lack of publicity this process has been changed into. I am not, once again talking or even willing to consider the arguments on the ISO rules. They don’t apply here. What I would like to outline here is that the Ecma is by no way legally bound to hide or restrictively distribute its answers to selected sets of standard organizations. The JTC-1 policies are clear on this matter no matter of their vagueness (they don’t request restriction, and they don’t prohibit publicity as well, as they even encourage public dissemination of information at this stage). 

What’s more, and perhaps even more critical to this situation, the actual Ecma process has become closed and secret. Now you need a password to access the TC 45 works and pages. This means three things to me: 1)This part of the Ecma process cannot be labelled as public and open 2)Given the number of modifications expected, we could argue that entire portions of the “amended” OOXML would not have been developed according to the generally accepted rules of open standards (public development and processes accessible to everybody).3)The time frame during which the TC 45 has been closed to many and open to a few extends over several months. Which means that during a non-negligeable, real period of time, OOXML has been developed behind closed doors, with no public scrutiny. All this makes the case of OOXML as an open standard harder to sustain day after day.

What is needed now is the public and unconditional access to the works of the TC 45. What is needed now is for the Ecma to give the password to their page. Give us the password! We’re laying siege at your gates…One may argue that the Ecma is providing a lot of changes. What we have here though is a press release, not tangible proposals. What we have here is the rumour of proposed changes, not the pledge by the reference implementation (yes, yes), Microsoft Office 2007 and its vendor to integrate and implement these changes and the agreed changes in the future. What we have here, at last, is a set of welcome changes but ones that are, oddly enough, changes that could be bothering any implementor to compete in governmental markets (see the focus on internationalization for instance). Am I coming to something nasty about all this? Not at all.

But frankly, let me paraphrase Mr. Ballmer in his declaration about Google’s Android: What they have is a press release. What we have is a real, open, and implemented standard. Its name is ODF. It is an ISO standard and it existed before OOXML.  You can see everything here  and here and you can even participate.Have a great end of the week!

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Sad farewell letter from Mr. Martin Bryan, now former convenor of the WG1 of the JTC-1 SC 34 (the ISO group working on OOXML and ODF). Alan Lord published it in extenso for fear that it would not stay long online, and since it’s rather short, I’ll publish as well for the same reasons:

“  The second half of 2007 has been an extremely trying time for WG1. I am more than a little glad my 3 year term is up, and must commiserate with my successor on taking over an almost impossible task.

WG1 has been struggling against the rules laid down ISO for a number of years, trying to prepare a complex multipart standard that needs to take account of work being done in OASIS, W3C and IETF within the extremely limited timescales laid down by ISO for completion of standards. While these rules make sense when you have a single standard, or sufficient members to multi-task, they make it impossible for a small group to produce a multipart standard. WG1 have frequently had to ask for extensions to our time limits, and must continue to do so while trying to produce an integrated suite of standards.

This year WG1 have had another major development that has made it almost impossible to continue with our work within ISO. The influx of P members whose only interest is the fast-tracking of ECMA 376 as ISO 29500 has led to the failure of a number of key ballots. Though P members are required to vote, 50% of our current members, and some 66% of our new members, blatantly ignore this rule despite weekly email reminders and reminders on our website. As ISO require at least 50% of P members to vote before they start to count the votes we have had to reballot standards that should have been passed and completed their publication stages at Kyoto. This delay will mean that these standards will appear on the list of WG1 standards that have not been produced within the time limits set by ISO, despite our best efforts.

Unless ISO tightens up on its rules, and removes or demotes, P members who do not vote as required by ISO rules I would recommend my successor that it is perhaps time to pass WG1’s outstanding standards over to OASIS, where they can get approval in less than a year and then do a PAS submission to ISO, which will get a lot more attention and be approved much faster than standards currently can be within WG1. The disparity of rules for PAS, Fast-Track and ISO committee generated standards is fast making ISO a laughing stock in IT circles. The days of open standards development are fast disappearing. Instead we are getting “standardization by corporation”, something I have been fighting against for the 20 years I have served on ISO committees. I am glad to be retiring before the situation becomes impossible. I wish my colleagues every success for their future efforts, which I sincerely hope will not prove to be as wasted as I fear they could be.

Martin Bryan
Convenor, ISO/IEC JTC1/SC34 WG1 “

What a shame.  Watch out, dear reader! If you want a standard, your standard, at all costs, follow the track of OOXML. An edifying tale on how to disrupt international processes just for your own sake.

And nice try, Brian, but this time you got it wrong as well:  The OASIS never turned the maintenance of ODF to the ISO, and was never asked to. Nice try, really, but please, do try to publish the Ecma answers and put them online. That would really help us and show your company does not fear transparency.

Have a great week-end!

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So now Brian Jones is all about explaining the infamous conspiracy’s plans to portray the distribution of the Ecma answers as being closed and locked up by MS. That’s not how I understand it.  The problem here is that there seems to be some attention paid at veiling the information  and the whole set of answers by the Ecma and that does raise questions. But who really said it was Microsoft? I don’t necessarily imply it. Brian thinks the HCCOTAMAEAC (High Command Center Of The Anti-Microsoft And Everything American Conspiracy) is up to something that would lure people into thinking it’s all Microsoft’s fault. But I can tell you that there are questions that, despite Jan Van Den Beld’s answers, remain either too vaguely answered or just not explained at all. And sorry to keep ranting about that particular one, but the jury’s still out on why in the hell the Ecma’s TC 45’s page is locked by a password. That’s, in my opinion, the biggest problem here, because the TC 45’s works are in a sense independent of the ISO/JTC-1.

You can pretend to give the password in question to any national standards organization, (by the way, I never got it, and I wonder if the Afnor has it, and being part of the committee, I actually doubt it ever had it ) , but the process has to be public. I mean, really public, like a web site with no passwords, open to everyone with public mailing lists and records of meetings minutes. Why is that not possible?

An interesting explanation might come up by studying the way traditional societies such as Ancient Greece or Medieval Europe considered the value of secrecy and its relationship with darkness and light. In short, you could theorize it by defining darkness (and thus, its obvious relationship to secrecy) as something that precedes the Light, something that has not been created or hasn’t manifested itself. “Fiat Lux”, and the Creation starts after that famous sentence.  The Ecma seems to have not manifested its Creation… yet. Or it has, but somebody revealed it before its Creator. The rest is mythology.

And talking about myth and darkness, I also wanted to share my thoughts on the controversy that looks more and more like a storm in a tea cup to me: More details are starting to emerge about the plans of the former OpenDocument foundation (Read here). I’ve known Gary Edwards and Sam Hiser (and even Marbux) for some time now. I told them what I was disagreeing on in regard of their actions, and what I was agreeing on. In short, I think their way of handling their PR really should be amended, and it wouldn’t hurt them, as it actually hurts the proponents of the true interoperability right now by sending panick waves.  I share some of their analysis on Microsoft SharePoint (actually share it completely), except that until now the adoption of SharePoint 2007 in Europe has been slower than in the US, hence the divergence of views on that.

SharePoint server, as I explained many times has the ability to insert OOXML once and for all inside your organization’s business processes. To counter this, Gary had a project, the Da Vinci plugin. I always thought of it not as a plugin but as an application server, running quietly inside the organization’s IT infrastructure and blocking SharePoint to a certain extent. The problem is that the Da Vinci plugin development was stopped or blocked, and anyway, in the end nobody saw it running. That’s the issue, because I would have like to believe in Gary’s whole claims and because of that I obviously cannot subscribe to them. So now they are turning to CDF, but when I come to think of it, it’s yet another huge miscommunication issue. CDF is, and will never be a document format in the sense one would generally understand it. It is more of wrapper, a meta-format embedding other formats, and among those, there could be ODF as the default document format. Yet the actual possibility of CDF largely remains to be demonstrated today, and in the end, the public outrage between the former OD foundation and the W3C is not going to speed up the development of CDF, nor will it help the Da Vinci team recover, I’m afraid. But all this, in the end, only helps Microsoft.

And mind you Brian, I’m not implying that Microsoft is behind all this…

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