Moved by Freedom - Powered by Standards

Update: I think the article from CIO says it all. The Head of Delegation of the ANSI (USA) explains what  went wrong. I think it’s a pity that the BRM ended up like this. In a nutshell, the whole idea of the BRM was to discuss the proposals from Ecma and the comments made by the delegations, and it just didn’t turn out it was possible. Delegates were rushed to vote on hundreds of comments in bulk , were told new rules had to be applied, and when many of them tried to propose solutions to technical or legal issues they were simply dismissed.

We’ll talk about this more in detail later, but as it stands today, the BRM has failed -failed to work, failed to impress, failed to create consensus and failed to succeed. Rules that were not part of the existing JTC-1 corpus had to be invented to come up with the astounding result of 6 countries approving the bulk voting versus 4 countries formally disapproving them, 18 others abstaining, while four others even refusing to vote as a way to show their complete disapproval of the way the BRM was being handled.Only committees of countries that were present in Geneva could vote, so they do not speak for the rest of the world. It is unfortunately likely that  Microsoft and the European Committee of Microsoft Advocates (Ecma) will declare victory, based on what is a pathetically weak relative majority and on the set of rules that go against both the letter and spirit of the JTC-1 legislation. Would this then be a pyrrhic victory? Hardly. It has yet to to be shown if the Ecma and ISO can actually do anything with that result and the growing resentment of national standardization committees. 

 In any case, we’re now back on for a month of national  ballot in each national committee, and I believe our discussions will be interesting as many of them will  not find the results of this week satisfying.

 On a positive side, I would like to thank everybody from the OFE meeting I and others attended to. This was truly an exciting event where we had the opportunity to have exciting discussions on open standards, Internet and technology in general.  Thank you OpenForum Europe!

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  This example of corporate citizenship is striking, and brought me to tears. Microsoft helps NGOs in India, a fascinating country with a fast-growing economy, but unfortunately with strong social inequalities and poverty. I find it deeply moving, and socially responsible that such a large and wealthy corporation has found the resources to help those who are not being helped and the ones in dire need of food, money, and education. Of course, there has to be some trade-offs, because there should never be free lunch, even for the ones who starve: Microsoft, according to this article, has conditioned its help to Indian NGOs to their support of OOXML. What the NGOs had to do was to send letters of support on OOXML to the federal government of India. I think it’s a small trade-off to have when you can get resources to help the poor. When a company like Microsoft is helping you out, the least you can do is to join its worldwide lobbying campaign to help maintain its monopoly, can’t you?  Now sing it aloud:

 ”We are the World,

We are the children… “ 

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Before you run away from this page thinking that I will vomit the snakes of hell on Microsoft’s latest press release, I just wanted clarify that it will not be the case, because I think the message Microsoft has sent yesterday has been completely misunderstood. Here’s why.

To be sure, this press release should be taken with extreme caution; Microsoft will not make it easier for its competition to implement its own formats; nothing has been said about ODF, no particular mention has been made about OpenOffice.org and Free and Open Source Software. Rather, they’re still feeding the ongoing legal confusion and trying to pollute Free Software While Microsoft’s decision to open up its protocols and APIs s certainly welcome, it does not really help the Free Software world not its direct competitors. Perhaps more importantly, it remains to be seen if Microsoft will properly execute what it just announced. Disgruntled reaction? Not really. For years, Microsoft has pledged to comply with the legal requirements demanded by the US Dept. of Justice, and the European regulators. But it never actually delivered the documentation and the specifications it had promised to free. Only in 2007 did it open up some of its documentation to the Samba project. A good reaction summarizing the issues at hand on this announcement can be found on the ECIS web site.

What also makes me  skeptical of this announcement is its timing. Just a few days before the BRM and right in the middle of the murky waters of OOXML lobbying, Microsoft just couldn’t have done better to spread confusion among the ISO delegates who will be arriving in Geneva in a couple of days.

However, I do think this announcement is important not because of what it announces, but because of what it implies in terms of public communication. Just by looking at the title and first sentences, you notice that besides the grandiose promises Microsoft is effectively, implicitely admitting it caused harm to the competition,  customers, and to the ecosystem at large. Microsoft is not so much announcing new or revolutionary measures, as it is declaring publicly that its past talk about interoperability, openness and fairness was a bag of hot air doubled with anti-competitive practices. And yet, I’m putting things mildly.

Here you may ask about why I think it’s important. It is important because Microsoft is claiming that it will stop its former practices; I don’t think it will though, but in doing so they are effectively showing that they lost the moral struggle between them and the rest of the world. They implicitely admitted they had been wrong on openness,  freedom, interoperability and competition. I think that anything they will say will have to be measured against that announcement. And this is why it is important. I do not know at this stage if Microsoft will one day evolve into a different company; open, innovative, responsible, and embracing competition. I sincerely hope it will. But at the moment I don’t think they are changing in any way.

This announcement may perhaps have made another loser out of the past situation: Novell. Novell banks on the fear, uncertainty and doubt cast by Microsoft to differentiate itself as a Linux player. Regardless of the quality of their solutions, Novell has one distinctive features for its customers: By claiming they offer them legal protection-by-proxy (Microsoft being in agreement with them), they pollute code with Microsoft’s intellectual property. The issue now for Novell is to sell the same value proposition to customers who just read something that is quite subtle to understand but that more or less amounts to, well, “now we’re nice and fair”. Perhaps it will force them to stop spreading FUD and actually sell solutions that come with the freedom to use, modify, study, distribute, and leave. Until that point, I’ll be skeptical.

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Short Answer: When it becomes manipulation. And before some of the Microsofties coiled in their upscale building of the rue de l’Université in Paris start to wonder if they should not be doing something about me, let me just point you to this link: The now famous Plamondon Files, one of whose is  adequately named “Evangelism is War”. Too late for the Schadenfreude, my dubious friends.

I am afraid Microsoft has embarked in a journey where  manipulation and astroturfing will be the longitude and latitude they will use to set their path. But let’s dive into the specifics.

The OOXML controversy has now reached a new stage. This stage could be labelled as the stage of confusion. The Ecma has answered to 3522 comments (and 3522 unique comments that should be dealt with appropriately, not by grouping hundreds of them because they seem to be the same) in a way that could be considered as positive at first glance. However, any deeper analysis of just a handful of these answers show that most of them have simply not been adequately answered. Aside the mention “Agreed” by the Ecma, we have several, not to say hundreds and hundreds of answers that worsen the existing flaws, contradict each other, or propose solutions that avoid any kind of common path with the existing ISO standard, ODF. That’s just the issue with the comments that have been answered to; others have been ignored.  The French convergence proposal has been flatly rejected by the Ecma on formal grounds. Namely -strap yourself- the convergence proposal cannot be properly addressed in the course of a Fast-Track process. What the Ecma forgets to mention here is that it’s precisely the reason why OOXML should not be approved as an ISO standard, since discussions and proposals on convergence or mentions of conflicts with existing standards do not seem to matter.

At the Afnor meeting we had last Friday, the refusal of the Ecma was discussed; Microsoft and its proxies were trying all sorts of arguments to convince us that the Ecma had not exactly rejected the proposal. They were trying to make the point that the Ecma had already answered the convergence -the harmonization as they call it- in an answer made to the committee of New Zealand. The problem is twofold here, but Microsoft obviously intended to blur the lines and confuse the committee:

-The proposal by the Afnor implied a roadmap and a sanitization work to be made on OOXML.  With all due respect to the standards board of New Zealand, its own proposal never contained such a project.

- Most importantly, the Afnor proposal did clearly imply that OOXML would never become an ISO standard (see here). OOXML could become an “ISO-TS” (Technical Specification) but there again the Ecma decided on vague formal gounds that the JTC-1 simply could not do it. I know for sure that there are other similar options and titles for the contentious OOXML if it were to follow that path. But the Ecma answer to New Zealand was implying in turn that harmonization could be possible if OOXML became an ISO standard.

I could also mention the odd attempts to push VML back into the OOXML spec… But there are more cunning aspects that have the obvious effect to confuse people in this story. And when I mean people, I mean ISO delegates, journalists, pundits, laymen, strawmen… and ultimately, customers. Because customers do pay attention to what’s going on with the OOXML issue and what will happen in Geneva.

On a legal point of view, the growing uncertainty on patents and intellectual property related to OOXML has gone unnoticed mostly because of the efforts made by the Ecma and Microsoft to alleviate those concerns, mostly through throwing incomplete, half valid protective claims on OOXML. I clearly remember that my company filed a comment pertaining to the legal gaps of the Open Specification Premise and the RAND agreement covering OOXML. Too many points inside the OOXML specifications are left uncovered by them, thus making it hazardous for anybody to implement OOXML. Another, very important point, is Microsoft’s refusal to make the OSP apply to GPL. That pretty much says it all on Microsoft’s will to open up the competition. The ODF Alliance has published a very good paper on this issue, but if you want more background on this, I suggest you read the excellent article by Roy Schestowitz.

In short, the confusion around intellectual property is so overwhelming that one is left unconvinced at the ability of the ISO to do its homework properly when it comes to patents and more generally IPR. Others have explained that all this was due to Microsoft’s will to “drown the fish” as the French saying goes, but I guess wondering about that at this stage would be beside the point.

Where confusion is obviously the result of a strategy devised by disingenuous people is the case of the Office Binary translation project.  After the bombastic announcement by Microsoft that it was to release the “documentation on its office binary file formats”, one could have thought that it would be able to receive the full binary specification and perhaps (an immoderate hope), perhaps the actual source code of those binary blurbs. You can always hope, “ain’t gonna happen”… All what is available is the same old documentation, most of it having been available until 1999 where it was taken off line from MSDN. This documentation is thoroughly incomplete, acutely inadequate and riddled by legal traps at least as bad as the ones carried by the OSP that covers these files. You will notice the subtle art of confusion that speaks of documentation but carefully avoids the words “full specification”.

Now the Office Binary to OOXML translator is one of those projects that actually makes OOXML irrelevant as a standard. If this project ever comes to fruition, which is at the moment not the case,  anybody -or so one might hope- could use this software to convert its binary, proprietary files from Microsoft Office to the controversial OOXML. But then why did we have OOXML in the first place? What about the advertised ability of OOXML to “faithfully represent” the behaviour of past applications? I guess this project should have somehow been included in the OOXML spec in the first place, because it does defeat the purpose of OOXML in the first place.

That’s one more contradiction for Microsoft to handle. But as I wrote the other day, “nevermind the money”…

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I think my trip to Geneva is going to be exciting. Exciting and interesting at the same time. There will be surprizes, laughters, and laments. But mind you, Geneva does not matter. It never mattered. The OOXML camp is trying to lure you into thinking that anything bad that could happen in Geneva during the BRM sessions will be caused by the likes of IBM (including my company; I’m rolling on the floor laughing.) What they hold to be much more important takes place after the BRM, during the month of March, when every national standardization board will have to cast a ballot, once again (this time will be the final ballot) on the proprietary OOXML. Expect pressures and moves behind curtains of all sorts coming from the OOXML camp. They have the might, they have the money, and they have the clout. But will it be enough?

What is wanted out of that quite concerted campaign involving a former chairman of Ecma International is the banning of any form of communication between the delegates and the conference on open standards. I understand that the JTC-1 delegates need quiet, reflective seclusion, but as Rob Weir pointed out himself, why didn’t the JTC-1 react in the light of so much contacts between the national standards bodies and Microsoft (the original author of the contentious Ecma specification) during the ballot period? Why did the ISO’s JTC-1 never react when insistant rumours -not to say evidences- of collusion and corruption started to appear? The past cannot be undone. But each of us can learn from our mistakes, including the ISO.

Oh, and there will be the dirty tactics and the cunning rethorics, too. There will be attempts to slip VML back into OOXML because it is difficult at this stage to have the problematic specification register as an ISO technical specification (ISO T-S, which is not an ISO standard). There will be attempts to confuse delegates, refusals to answer some good questions, just like the Afnor’s proposal for convergence was bluntly refused by the Ecma. Nonetheless, the Afnor should and will carry on, despite the procedural arguments that will be thrown against it:  The Ecma wants to keep its record of being the sole industrial standardization agency that has never refused the standardization of any specification it was in charge of. Nevermind the money.

Last but not least, some measures have to be taken in order to ease the standardization of the controversial OOXML itself.  There seems to be a need for its supporters to balance their lack of popularity. After all, it’s pretty hard to gather more than  eighty thousands people signing against a controversial candidate for standardization. At the very least, it’s a pretty impressive score for a not so mainstream topic. So instead of amending their ways, (for some it’s too late) the OOXML proponents have devised this new -and probably impressiveto their own eyes- strategy of making the ODF camp look evil. I’m laughing once again, because it’s just pathetic. This monopoly is trying hard to make others look bad, using deceptive tactics and will fail to do so because it still has not understood that people always prefer the victims and not their torturer.

So here’s my message to the employees of Microsoft Corporation and the employees of all their Gold Partners who will attend the Geneva BRM: Try harder, you still ain’t there.

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