Moved by Freedom – Powered by Standards

• A quite interesting thread in the comments on my latest piece. Who got the point? Well, that’s the trick:I have the feeling we’re still talking about different things. And the discussion is raging on, so let’s just hope it will remain polite.

• Mac Upgrade: Leopard is shaky and eats up some memory. Plus, Mozilla Thunderbird can get sluggish and buggy, Java support is broken (and so OpenOffice.org has problems) and I still don’t see the whole benefit for the users. My take? Better use Linux; what I especially like about Macs are the macs themselves. The OS really is a BSD with a ton of proprietary eye-candy, and sometimes this can become tireseome.

• A blog about PDF, by Jim King. A fascinating read providing insight on PDF, XML, and the history of computing. Jim has a good take on the actual use cases for PDF documents, but he has that natural tendency to defend his beef a little too much over what’s necessary. In doing so, Jim misses some point: while a format, and I’d say, any format may reflect at least some of the features set of the native application it stems from, it is not necessarily a bad thing. At least, it can be helped through a plural, open and public process. See ODF: Sun, OpenOffice.org originated what would later become an ISO standard. But players like KDE and IBM also joined in. Talking about features sets, I’d call that leverage. And as Rob Weir pointed out recently, maybe what I want out of my documents is not just to keep their layout intact, but what I also want is to update them and manipulate their data. There is not everlasting truth in that matter. Suffice to say, the document metaphor is changing, as I have explained elsewhere several times. The layout aspect is one side of the problem, not the whole problem.

• Comparing the documents size: there seems to be a difference between the size of a regular MS Doc format and and ODF document. Nothing new here, except perhaps that the document in question was the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in its English version.

• I’m moving to a new apartment: Tough but exciting. And the part of Paris where I live now is great, but there’s still a lot of work to do although the very hard part (the moving itself) is done.

Stay tuned!

Share This

General, OpenDocument Format

Recently the Ecma announced that they would be posting their first set of answers to the comments made by the national standardization committees on OOXML. The Ecma claims this first set covers about 19% of the comments. While I appreciate the reactivity of the Ecma in these matters, I can’t help but notice both the lack of transparency and the laconism of the early responses of the Ecma on OOXML.

As a member of the Afnor committee in charge of OOXML, I am expecting to receive a full copy of the answers from the Ecma, and I understand these are underway. But from what I can see on the Ecma web site, I see simply no public, open and for that matter transparent process of thinking and writing of the answers to the comments made on OOXML made by the national boards. Sorry, I may have missed a chapter here but I find it highly surprizing that there is not a single line of discussion, let alone email threads between two or more experts from the Ecma debating what answer to any given comment should be. If you find such evidence, please forward it to me.

What I see however, is a set of press releases (here and there) announcing the future publication of these answers and the outdated set of answers to the early comments made during the fast track period of OOXML. Those answers and the document are of course obsolete by now.

This lack of publicity reminds me of some fundamental characteristics of any open standard: their development should be public, open, and accessible to all. This is obviously not the case here. Or else what could justify the “veiling” of this work phase by the Ecma? I don’t see why the writing of the expected answers should be closed to public… My humble advice to the Ecma: it looks like you or some of your members are afraid of publicizing your thought process and the reflections on the improvement of OOXML. Because you are of course working towards improving OOXML, aren’t you?

Last but not least, I am under the impression that what I will receive from the Ecma as part of the Afnor committee is not the whole set of answers, but the set of answers to the particular comments sent by the Afnor. And there I have a problem with that. It may seem picky, but when you come to think of it, it’s not. After the 2nd of September the list of comments made by every national standardization body that had voted was widely available on the Internet. Experts and committees, journalists, concerned citizens were thus able to learn from that list and discover things they may not have realized, or at least, form an educated opinion out of it. Now, if the Ecma sends to each committee the answers to its own comments, there will be no more opportunity to get a broad overview of Ecma’s answers. I would like to have such a document because it helps gaining a better understanding of Ecma’s answers and of the issues they’re fixing (or are refusing to fix).

Some evil geniuses and professional critics have objected behind the scenes that this was a cunning move designed to divide and conquer, to put barriers on the standardization committees in order to make it difficult for them to gain a deeper understanding of the situation. My friends from the other side of the Cascade Range will have guessed that I’m being perhaps hypnotized by the HCCOTAMAEAC (High Command Center Of The Anti-Microsoft And Everything American Conspiracy). But regardless of how much turkey I haven’t been eating in this Thanksgiving Holiday, which went completely unnoticed in France, I find it seriously disturbing that the Ecma does not let anybody access and read the “answering process” on OOXML and takes great caution at splitting its answers to each national committees. Secrecy, in that matter, helps no one.

Share This

OpenDocument Format

Below you will find some links to resources that provide information on a broad range of topics, but each of them shows what can be achieved to help such things as transparency, free markets, democracy, and participation. Some of them accuse, others help promote and build a better world. Don’t think I’m an idealist. I’m very much into what Karl Popper labeled as “social engineering” (nothing related to geeks here) and believe in results and facts. So below, you’ll find a collection of web sites that also share something else in common: they all use Free Software and Open Source technologies to power them. That’s also how the power of conversation, risen from the Internet culture and bred with FOSS, has emerged today as being the way we conceive the Internet. And that’s just the beginning…

• A map of the word censorship on the Internet
• The International Open Source Network
• Fighting for the freedom of the internet and a free information infrastructure
• Against fake standards
• How to start your own advocacy campaign (some ideas for activists)

Enjoy your day!

Share This

General, Web 2.0

These are almost old news, but it seems that since we’re based in Europe it took some time and went through different channels. Ars Aperta has joined the OpenInvention Network. The question that would immediately pop to some of my readers’ mind would be: what the heck is OpenInvention Network? And then I assume there would be questions about the official position of Ars Aperta in regard of software patents. Let me seize this opportunity to address this quite interesting question. First, the OIN is in the business of acquiring software patents and granting rights on them for free to anyone. Its founders are IBM, Red Hat, Philips, NEC, Sony and Novell. It is actually the opposite of a patent troll, in that it acquires patents in order to open them to the industry. The scope of patents acquired by the OIN covers the whole Linux stack (OpenOffice.org is covered there by the way). The OIN is also in the process of acquiring more and more patents in order to “open them up”.

So what does Ars Aperta have to do about this? Quite simply, we do not believe in software patents. We believe that software patents critically hamper innovation, allow the dominant players to impose their rule and exclude competition. By doing this, they stifle innovation and affect the way people live and use technology. Software patents are a perversion of the patent concept, in spirit as much as in practice. They should not exist, but unfortunately they do. We also know that in regard of the law, software patents do not exist and thus cannot be enforced in the European Union and in France. Things, helas, are changing quickly, and Ars Aperta can be involved in operations covering North America, where software patents exist and are a booming business. Thus we believe that this agreement with OIN is a sound business and legal decision for us and allows the OIN to extend its reach outside the North American market.

We look forward to a day where software patents will not exist anymore and strongly speak in favour of their complete disappearance from North American and European laws. Until then one has to go out covered.

Stay tuned!

Share This

Ars Aperta

ﾠ

Today I’m in London attending the OpenSource Summit and listening to Bruce Perens. I landed yesterday evening in London under a violent storm that caused the plane to be very shaky (it will be interesting to fly back this evening).

Being shaken up and down and back and forth made me feel a little bit like OpenDocument Format could “feel” these days. Just try to imagine yourself how an ISO standard feels and let’s pretend we never had that conversation… Anyway.You read the news just like I did; a more or less complete press review is here, thanks to Sam Hiser. The least I can say is that I am disappointed by the OpenDocument Foundation, not because they’re switching to a different format, but because of the media effect their announcement unleashed. As a matter of fact, I think that I read pretty much every opinion in the press about it: the Foundation is a bunch of traitors, they could have a point and, wait a minute, aren’t they just three guys in a garage?

ﾠ

My beef with the OpenDocument is that they really did hurt the Open Standards cause by coming out in public about their new orientation, and they indirectly helped the spreading of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt by Microsoft and the press about ODF. That being said, I wish them good luck with their new endeavours (although I’m more than a bit skeptical about the “Compound Document Format” at this stage) and believe that as much as they and I disagree about several topics, they are in favor of Open Standards.

ﾠ

But let’s take a closer look to the situation with ODF itself, and leave the Foundation’s claims aside for a moment. The Foundation may be gone, but ODF itself is doing quite well and is gaining new (mighty) contributors. Yes, Google is siding with ODF. So long for the odd and quite sad feast of business and technology merging happening between Novell and Microsoft. Microsoft keeps thundering and lenifying about patents at the same time, but Novell seems to be on the verge of no-return. Here and there, its engineers keep bragging about how great OOXML is, and its marketing message is all about merging and “interoperability”. Is that what the customers need? Customers need things like Samba, or virtualization, but they don’t need to have Microsoft selling them Linux. It’s precisely what they’re running away from.

ﾠ

ﾠ

Back to the OASIS. We’re about to publish the 1.2 version of ODF, and this will be submitted first as an OASIS standard and then will take the way to the ISO. Speaking about which, I have heard here and there that the JTC-1’s SC 34 of the ISO (the group in charge of OOXML and ODF among other things) is being paralyzed by the number of new “P” countries that discovered they had a passion for OOXML but fell short of being competent on the other standard proposals. What I see coming though, because I witnessed this at the Afnor, is that Microsoft and its proxies will do anything in their power to stall ODF 1.2 at at the ISO and inside the national standards orgaizations. The reason is simple: If their objectives was to have two standards, ODF certainly could have led a life of its own and that would not have been a concern to Redmond. But now that the situation becomes trickier for OOXML, a vested interest in severely harming ODF seems to become more prominent.

Expect lots of surprizes, laughs, scandals, and dirty tricks in 2008. The spin doctors are already at work. Stay tuned…

ﾠ

Share This

OpenDocument Format