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I think this is a question worth asking. Although this links to an article in French, you’ll probably get the idea: Bill Gates is visiting my beautiful city, Paris, just like many other well-known figures the U.S have brought to the world, such as Britney Spears, Georges W. Bush and Mr Potato. The major difference with them is that Bill Gates did not have to avoid mobs of curious people or fans (although I think Mr Potato managed to spend some time pretty much anonymously ). Bill Gates took the opportunity to enslave sign an agreement with the mayor of Paris that will provide educational and social services of the city with “free” PCs running Windows Vista (oh, Joy!).

So this world benefactor (I know, I know, he’s done a lot to fight AIDS. But wait, there’s more to it) that everybody loves had to set up a press conference with no journalists around, while bodyguards and roads were emptied for his cars to circulate. Here’s a man who’s loved by everybody, that comes to Paris for an initiative to help bridging the digital divide, and who has to hide from people.

Call me envious, jealous, or simply evil, but it’s been a long time I don’t buy into Mr Gate’s social initiatives. I call them enlightened self-interest, especially when it’s about offering computers running Vista to the poor the very same day the French gendarmerie is announcing the migration of 70,000 desktops to Ubuntu Linux. Yes, you read that right. If there’s any news this week coming from France, this is it.

Now, I respect what Mr Gates’s other initiatives worldwide, I truly do, because no good deed should be unappreciated. But this kind of political agreements trapping one and benefiting the other outlines how powerless behemoths like Microsoft arein front of Free Software. As time will go by, we will see more announcements related to migrations to the Linux desktop, and Microsoft should better realize this instead of vampirizing whole governments. No monopoly lasts for ever, just like no system is perfect. In fact, flawless systems only exist in the mind of their authors.

Let’s take an example: The City of Paris can boast one of the very best public cleaning services in the world (it truly has such one) .Yet everybody who ever walked in the streets of Paris has noticed how much dog’s poo lies on the sidewalks. Our public cleaning service is not perfect, and many citizens are just careless, although our cleaning service is improving every year.

That’s just the same with Free Software: Its adoption will continue to grow, but you will always learn about those dubious and grandiose announcements  related to Microsoft. If you pay too much attention to those, you will miss the bigger picture, just like paying attention to the annoyances on the street of Paris will make you miss how much this city is beautiful.

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Hewlett-Packard released two very interesting web sites last week, fossology.org and fossbazaar.org . While Fossology is a project aiming to develop data analysis tools on FOSS, fossbazaar is more of a portal on FOSS governance and adoption strategy for organizations.

I really like this kind of initiatives, although fossbazaar.org obviously dwells a bit too much on my company’s business. As a result, Ars Aperta will soon invest in the manufacturing and sale of printers, both laser and colour in order to meet HP’s move on its core business. Wait! Who wrote this? Go out of my body, ghost of MS executive! Go! 

Of course, I’m kidding. Nobody’s interested in printers. More seriously, there is something both useful and annoying in fossbazaar.org . The site and its content, wether it’s hosted or linking to third-party web sites, is targeted at I.T. managers and executives. It provides them with some strategic insight, makes them ask the right questions (although not all of them). Yet it falls short of being disruptive, in the sense that it does  provide the audience with the full picture on FOSS adoption and use inside organizations.

The documents, advices and methodologies shown and advertised on the site are similar for the most part to what Ars Aperta provides its customers with. Yet, fossbazaar.org does only cover a few aspects of a comprehensive strategy for the use and the adoption of FOSS in organizations, namely, the legal risk of adoption and the governance of FOSS usage.

In doing so, it gains the merit of being granular for “checks and balances” but misses the whole context and reasons for adoption and usage of FOSS, let alone the lack of official reasons making up for the rampant use of FOSS by an IT department leaving its CIO and the other executives blissfuly unaware of who uses what in their business. This, in turns, may not be easily solved by the creation of a review board or the setup of adoption and usage policies.

Another aspect of the issue is the different perception of the legal matters for software in the entreprise.  In Europe at least, local cultures and business practices create a very different legal environment than in North America. While legal matters are of course taken very seriously, the perception that a software vendor could sue a company that does not compete with it (and thus being a real or a potential customer) is thin, to put things mildly. The legal culture, not to say the legal folklore in Europe is quite different from the one in North America, and litigation does very often set a point of no-return, not just between the defendant and the plaintiff, but also between the plaintiff and the industry at large. You’d thus better have some very sound and strong legal reasons to even consider litigation.

The other reason is the actual business processes surrounding the adoption of FOSS by large or small organizations. In France for instance, most of the Free and Open Source Software is “acquired” or rather enabled through a service agreement between the organization and a service provider. The sale of a software license or a support contract directly from a software vendor is less common. When purchasing such services from medium or large service companies (many of which are French) the customer expects to be legally covered wether directly or indirectly by having a clause written in the agreement or checking that the provider has the adequate insurances or partnerships with software vendors.

What can happen though in large organizations is the realization that FOSS is already in use for several years, and that the CIO’s office is under siege by hungry sales reps trying to sneak around with MS Vista or SharePoint.  At that stage situations do, of course, vary. An audit may often be recommended and made, but hardly because of doubts on the legal compliance of the software stack.The audit would assess which Free and Open Source software is being used and the span of its deployment .

You can then either have the setup  of a review committee and the drafting of a comprehensive listing of the software being used in the organization, or more simply the payment of official support contracts (either for whole stacks of software or for some packages in particular) to a service provider or a software vendor. But at no point in the process the legal matters involving software licensing were a determining factor for the organization.

What misses from my description is, as I wrote earlier, the whole context that is important for an organization. This page from our website may help you understand our take on these matters more accurately. As long-time practioners as consultants and contributors in Free Software communities, the people at Ars Aperta tend to bring the adoption and use of FOSS into a broader perspective than the legal compliance of and the IP issues related to source code, as important as these matters might be sometimes. We tend to work with our customers on the underlying reasons of their choice, analyzing their needs as well as what the rest of the industry does, and we also focus on their organization’s agenda. Then we can safely proceed along the lines of what is described on fossbazaar.org and according to the customer’s needs.

But now comes the time where I’ll be politically incorrect for a few lines: You can create as many open source review boards you want, it does not mean you will be able to benefit the most from FOSS or that FOSS will be the most effective way to go for your information infrastructure. In short, you have to understand how FOSS projects work and how you can pull some added value from them, and then think on how you can bring them added value. Bringing them added value (i.e. contributing) is a not bad word. It does not even mean investing in them or sponsoring. Sometimes it’s just about talking to the guy in the third cubicle around the corner, who’s contributing to a key FOSS project and has been doing so for several years. Maybe this guy has more knowledge about the source code and the actual benefits of the software, let alone the maturity of the project behind the software than any of your consultants/lawyers/board members have.

I have been contributing to OpenOffice.org for too long to think you can properly evaluate Free and Open Source Software with metrics and methodologies. The numbers just do not make for the whole understanding of the value it might deliver to an organization. This is where Ars Aperta’s Community Relationship Management  comes in the picture. What this new “CRM” means is that Ars Aperta can act as the bridge between the FOSS project(s) and the organization in order to allow the two of them to gain a better understanding and create value.

One might think that a client would have nothing to gain from allowing any given FOSS project to create value on its back. But it would have nothing to lose either, and at the time of the relationship economy, having a priviledged relationship with the project or even the company that power your everyday’s business can be a good idea (especially when this part costs you nothing).

Where does this community relationship management fit in the FossBazaar? Not aside the IP analysis of the source code. Such a task can be relevant  for M&A, but don’t go to an install party advertising what you’re doing. That would simply show how disconnected you are from FOSS.

And in the end, that’s this kind of problems that surprize me with FossBazaar.org . It’s a great place for theoretical ressources on FOSS governance and management. But it does basically stop at that level. There is nothing that tells you to go out and talk to the projects; worse, it lets you believe you can effectively assess FOSS with ready-made methodologies working with PHP from an obsure floor of your company’s building. I have too much consideration for the people at HP to believe that’s truly how they operate with FOSS. Our world is much more complex, and people at HP are too smart to believe fossbazaar.org is the only way to FOSS governance.

After all,  it’s not because I’ve read the Art of War by Sun Tzu several times that I’d be a great general.

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2008 will be a year many will remember. At least, it will be known as the year where the stock market plummeted and the subprime-inducted crisis took millions of Americans out of their home. On a lighter note, 2008 will also be remembered as the year of the “3.0″ for OpenOffice.org.

Besides the obvious symbolic value of the version number,  the OpenOffice.org is readying itself to what will be a crucial release for its future.

The Marketing Project, thanks to the leadership of John McCreesh and Florian Effenberger, is busy revamping entire portions of the web site, while new means of communication (a blog aggregator) are being tested. Other teams have quietly been rolling out new services and projects in order to improve almost every aspect of what can be referred to as “the OpenOffice.org experience”.

The User Interface project fosters users’ input in order to improve the existing user interface, while the Quality Assurance project redesigned its project’s page and ran several months ago its QA Track services (a second version being expected soon).  Much in the same line, the overall infrastructure requirements for the project are being discussed and solutions defined . A much expected addition to the project was the integration of full-featured user forums. They provide a new venue for users who may not be comfortable with mailing lists. Creation of multi-lingual forums is on its way.

Wether the 3.0 will be released according to the expected schedule does not really matter though. What will ultimately matter is what can be described as the explosion - implosion of OpenOffice.org both as a project and as product. As a product, the 3.0 will allow a lot more extendability and the extensions web site will also be fully functional. The extension and the creation of a real ecosystem will be perennial to the OpenOffice.org success as a product. On a technical level, the 3.0 will be an important milestone in the architectural changes going on deeply inside the code base. The 3.0 will be the base platform for componentizing OpenOffice.org and build a rich client based on the UNO technology.In this regard, one can call this the explosion of OpenOffice.org but in a good sense of course.

The implosion (also heard in a positive way) refers to the changes happening inside the OpenOffice.org project. The coming of new corporate members changes the ratios, pushing some to the bottom of the contributors (as Novell), some others to the most important contributors of the project (RedOffice) while the community of individuals, wether code contributors or contributors in other ways, still amounts for the second largest contributing party in the project. The integration of new corporate members, such as IBM, is mostly seen as a welcome and much desired addition to the project. However, the issue of representativity and the fear of having the project’s governance being swallowed up in the heap of corporate interests, as enlightened as they can sometimes be, does exist and must be addressed. The setup of an advisory board has eased some of these concerns as it acts as a communication platform between all the contributors, but it also needs to show it can last in time. Moreover, the governance of OpenOffice.org has to show that it can adapt to the rising challenge of new contributors while improving representativity.

2008 will thus be an opportunity for OpenOffice.org to drive forward deep changes that will, if they’re carried on succesfully,  help sustain its adoption and secure its technology and project for the years to come. My (humble) take on this is that we’re nowhere better than when we face this kind of challenges, and I think OpenOffice.org has much to show to the world and to its community.

Have a great week-end!

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And I’m not afraid to write it again: What are you guys think you’re doing? Level up the fight, I’m yawning!

First there is that “oh, we forgot we never gave you the specs of our binary file format” game popping up again through Brian Jones, as if nobody had seen that one coming.  So what’s wrong with this? Let me write that again in an easy way: If Microsoft were truly delivering the whole specs, not only would the OOXML spec be at least half smaller, (why do you need all these mysteries about faithfully representing past application behaviors?), but the whole OOXML hoax would be made completely useless. Besides, there are two elements that are left undiscussed here: Wether Microsoft will actually deliver the specs entirely and not just partially just like they already did before, and when they will publish the specs. All what we have here is, yes, we will deliver you the specs, and you will be prompted to sign a license agreement before you can actually read anything, so that’s again an old story, just like they did during the ballot period in France.

By the way Brian, let’s go through the list of OOXML implementations you’re quoting in your blog: around 21 are being listed. The problem is, when you look carefully at that list, you discover there are only 3 genuine OOXML implementations, and yet most of them are only partial. There is yours, the one of MS Office, and we know you can’t even fully implement the Ecma spec but do implement your own, custom version of OOXML. Then there’s the one from Apple (iWork), although that’s just an import/export filter and it only works well for simple documents. I was surprized to unzip a .docx document the other day whose subfolders had been created in 1980. Yet another datation issue? Ahem. Let’s move on. Then there is the CleverAge/Novell plugin, and that one makes up for many of the other implementations you list, (Novell OpenOffice.org edition, Xandros, etc.) . The trouble is, this implementation is far to be effective, and you know it, but of course we will not argue about the dichotomy of the implementation and the specification. Then you have listed a set of implementations that I’d label under the “anything goes” category: they implement between 0 and 5 % of the OOXML spec, and they do it the easy way: you actually can label any document to be an OOXML file provided you make it start and end with the two proper namespaces. Not very interesting, I think.

Second, there is the Burton Group’s whitepaper on OOXML.  (Disclosure: Ars Aperta, my company, is an independent firm providing strategic insights and management consultancy services on FOSS and Open Standards). The ODF Alliance wrote a very nice and granular rebuttal of their “study”. My point here is not that they wrote something in favor of the controversial OOXML format. The issue I have with the Burton’s study is that the arguments they are using are simply and flatly wrong. I guess one could ask the following question: “When is a consultant not a consultant?” If they really had to publish their take on the whole issue they should at least work on their topic, shoulnd’t they?

That’s not the case here, and even their stance on having written a study not commissioned by Microsoft or any other vendor falls short: Take a look here. Clearly speaking, the Burton Group is a Microsoft shop. That’s not an issue for me, but at least they could have tried harder.

I had come to expect more and better from the OOXML bunch. Perhaps they’re just hiding what they have in store for the BRM sessions, or afterwards in the 30 day period where national standards organization will have to make up their mind for a final decision on OOXML.

My fortune cookie of the day: “Never Ignore Evil”.

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The title really says it all: The Ecma applies for a fast-track procedure at the beginning of 2007; despite objections, it’s going through the process with a razor-thin margin. Remember the fast-track proceedings are about checking major flaws in the specification beforehand. Nothing comes out of it, but when it goes through examination by the countries, thousands of comments, most of them pointing out to alleged issues, hundreds of them actually highlighting major flaws in OOXML, are being produced and published. 

 Back to our time now: On the 14th of January 2008, the final set of answers to the comments  is being published on the Ecma web site (note that you still need a password to access those so the public is left out in the wild). The closed OOXML specification (just because it does not match the publicity requirement makes it lose its “open” attribute) will thus be amended.  

But will it really be that much modified ? 

I don’t think so. I’m browsing through the answers made to the comments by the Afnor. What strikes me as odd is how many comments are actually  approved by the Ecma. This sure does change with the “engineers” we met back then in Paris who would literally refuse everything, unless the changes were from an editorial nature.

So these are good news until you actually read the proposed dispositions.They are located at the bottom of each addressed comments. They usually start out like that: “Agreed.” - Some blurb follows - and then the least technical of us realizes easily that he’s been fooled. The Ecma may agree with the comment at hand,  but its detailed answer ends up by proposing something that does or doesn’t modify what the proposal made in the original comment with arguments that usually go along the lines of self-justification, polite rephrasing of the comment that bends it to the Ecma’s view and ended up confusing the reader. 

Now, I have to praise the work of Ecma, no matter how opaque, obscure, strange and closed it went. They actually read 3522 comments and replied to them. I hope the international delegates will be able to review this amount of data in 4 days (!), because that just looks impossible to me.  Seriously, 3522 comments in 4 days published over more than 2000 pages? That makes 880 and half comment per day (ouch!) and around 36 comments per hour assuming that the delegates will work 24 hours a day… So the BRM will either have to examine a part of the proposed dispositions, or it will have to be turned into a parody of an international meeting of experts. A good way to turn the BRM into such a joke has been made possible by cautiously separating each set of comments by country. Be sure that the Ecma will ask that each country delegate only discusses dispositions that are contained within the set of comments received by its country. That will be a way to “gain some time”, or rather, to buy time and vigilance. Of course, the BRM should be an opportunity to discuss all the comments regardless of the country they’re originating from, but there will be no time for this. After all, 3522 addressed comments on a 6000 pages-long specification only make up for more than one objection every two pages.

As for me, I was able to review a part of the answers to the comments from Afnor, but what strikes me as odd is how these were taken into account by the Ecma. 

What did the Afnor ask? You’ll have more details, half of them in French, here.  The Afnor laid out an ambitious proposal that aims to merge OOXML into ODF. In order to do this, several steps have to be completed. The Ecma and the OASIS have to talk, and OOXML has to be “cleaned up”, split into two distinct parts, one fit for becoming one day part of the future ISO standard, and another one (mostly VML and the problematic features mimicking past behaviors) that would be excluded from ISO examination. The Afnor also made clear that OOXML was not satisfactory at this stage and thus could not be thought of as a potential standard; as an example, the long list of comments, around 600 of them, were sent. What this means is that what the Afnor really wishes is convergence, not necessarily having every comment addressed, as the convergence should run at its own pace and proceed in its own way. Yet this convergence proposal was really the only official comment made by the French committee. And it’s precisely what did not happen yesterday. Every comment was addressed, except the one about convergence (unless I’m being misstaken, but I don’t find anything related to it in the available documents). 

I hereby consider that the questions raised by France have not been addressed. And I find this extremely disappointing, because as difficult as this proposal was sometimes judged, the Ecma did not even try to address it. All this does not build confidence neither in Ecma nor in Microsoft.

Other questions were raised elsewhere, such as the actual will of Microsoft to implement the amended version of OOXML. At this stage, too many points are left unanswered; it is not even obvious that Microsoft itself will be able to proceed with all the expected changes to its existing documents’ base. I am thus irritated and I do feel frustrated over all this. I should perhaps not be surprized to learn about the two simultaneous investigations ongoing in Europe targeting Windows, MS Office, and… OOXML. Perhaps should I not feel surprized by this study either?

So let’s rehearse all this for one moment:  OOXML gets the fast-track approval by the ISO, moves on to formal examination by the international standards committees, gets blocked unless some conditions such as fixing thousands of issues are being properly addressed (wasn’t the fast-track meant to avoid this kind of problems?) obtains a period of  4 more days (the BRM) during which international experts will browse through 3522 comments hoping to find a way out. Meanwhile, two investigations target this specification and its reference implementation, MS Office while a study links the affirmative answer of standards committees to the level of corruption measured in their country.

What else do you need? Ah, you need that below…

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