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The story of OOXML and in general the story of proprietary formats and protocols being used and promoted to control the market and the access of citizens to digital re sources is a long but fascinating one. The three (yes, three) last episodes of the OOXML story are a good example of that.

Ever since Wednesday night, three important news were announced. Let me comment each of them as briefly as I can.

• Microsoft will not support the ISO standard sometimes referred to as OOXML in its current set of office solutions, Microsoft Office 2007 and 2008 (for Macs). The formats used by Microsoft are also called OOXML, but they are not the same as the ISO/IEC 29500 standard. Confusing? Hmm, yes. That one, about which we know very few besides that the ITTF refuses to share it with the world, will be implemented by MS Office 14, the next version Office around 2010 or 2011. And me who thinks there were hundreds of OOXML implementations? Where are they? Gone, gone, gone, with the wind, just like the Old South of Scarlet O’Hara, a fantasy of past times, which OOXML today turns out to be.
• I willingly put the news item on the lack of support of OOXML by Microsoft Office 2007 first, because I get the feeling that these are the most important news here. But if you check the source , you will also see the other very important news item: Microsoft will integrate the native support of ODF in Microsoft Office 2007. This calls for several comments. First, what Microsoft will do exactly is left to be seen. We are told that the ODF support will come with the Office 2007 Service Pack 2 that will be released in 2009. That’s a long time before the market can benefit from ODF in Microsoft products. Perhaps more disturbingly, Microsoft announces the support for ODF 1.1. I understand that’s the majority of the ODF documents out there, and I would understand this as being a very pragmatic choice if its support was not scheduled in 2009, that is, months and months after ODF 1.2 will be released (at least as definite specification). That is something I have trouble understanding. The second question I have is what kind of native support we’re talking about. I am inclined to think that we might have an actual quality support of ODF in Microsoft Office, but integrating a converter such as the existing ones or providing lousy support -on purpose- will not do the job. The market wants real, native, effective support of ODF (real-world version) in MS Office as soon as possible and with no strings attached. All things considered, I do however genuinely applaud Microsoft’s move and find it useful and welcome provided that no games are played and transparency and openness are respected.
• Microsoft is also announcing its participation to the OASIS ODF Technical Committee. One less well contemplated element in this news is that Microsoft announces that their OSP (Open Specification Promise) will cover ODF. I don’t know what to think about it at this stage, so my opinion will be transitional (no pun intended here). I am not sure how useful this is, as the OSP conveys no rights and is notably unsafe for Free Software implementations, dixit the Software Freedom Law Center. In short, I don’t like that announcement about the OSP. It smells bad, or at the very least dubious. In the same train of thoughts, I believe the OASIS should be wary of what Microsoft really wants to do inside the ODF TC. But here again, I am applauding the move by Microsoft, although I suspect them of having ulterior motives.
• Last but not least, the South African Bureau of Standards (SABS) has filed an appeal to the ISO/IEC today against OOXML . This is an important decision. I believe that the whole OOXML standardization process has turned into a farce, and many think the same. Perhaps the ISO will deem this appeal receivable, unless their strange world-logic will make them feel offended by this request. In short, the latest announcements should not all of a sudden redeem Microsoft for what they did to the standardization, the industry, and the citizens at large. The software vendor has actually managed to destroy trust of many people, including the European Commission, who now wants to check how well Microsoft will play with ODF . Old world’s paranoïa? No. But somebody’s got to do something about it, somehow.

The points above call for some closing comments. How will this affect the industry? It is too early to tell, and besides, these are just announcements. We will see what kind of beef will be served later on. On the front of open standards, this could be a moderate success. If Microsoft walks the line, we will see an expansion of interoperability across the industry, the users and the vendors; but we’re still waiting for Microsoft Office to use ODF by default.

In the end, this will have been a tremendous waste of time. I’m sure that Microsoft will try to gain some advantage from OOXML, as broken as it is. They could try to reproduce what they managed to do with .NET and CLR by standardizing and opening only a subset of the .Net API , thus letting Novell create a very limited .Net implementation, Mono. Regardless of what the future options could be, the OOXML standardization will prove to be the single most destructive episode of the standardization history. No other standard will have been paid so dearly to achieve so few, while in the real world, the unspecified file format called OOXML and used by Microsoft Office 2007 will continue to lock in generations of users; Sharepoint will not stop using OOXML, as Matt Asay points out. All this, to put it to rest, begs one and final comment, led to nothing more than what we had start off with: a real open standard (ODF), a proprietary format, and the vague premise of an ISO standard. Urinating on a violin would not have taken us any further.

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That’s official and it comes from Alex Brown, the convener of the OOXML ballot at the ISO/IEC’s JTC-1:

Tracks of OOXML have been found somewhere around the ITTF. The story we now have is that the ITTF received a draft of OOXML on the 29th of March but refused to publish it. Several national standards bodies protested. But remember, Die Partei hat immer Recht.  So it is likely that what will come out of that process is a standard that has not been reviewed by anyone except the ITTF, whose involvement in the development of OOXML is at best intermittent. Worse, Alex Brown points out the lack of review and QA as being a real problem, and mind you, that’s Alex Brown speaking.

So where are we now? I would first like to thank Mr Brown for his clarifications, but I am not sure we’re anywhere more advanced than yesterday. We still have no bloody OOXML, and that’s not going to happen anytime soon. The latest findings only confirm how the standardization process has become a farce.

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We are on the 14 ^th of May and OOXML is an ISO standard. Slight problem: there is no known specification or definitive draft of that ISO standard. To be sure, we know what the first version of Ecma 376 looks like, and we know it pretty well, although it’s 6000 pages long. What we also know is that over a thousands of comments were being addressed during the Ballot Resolution Meeting in Geneva, although a great part of them did not find a satisfactory solution. Regardless of the slight glitch in the JTC-1 rules that was witnessed in Geneva, it is likely that these 1000 comments will require some thorough rewriting of the first and only known version of Ecma 376 in order to become an ISO standard.This point was addressed partly by forcing having the national standards bodies worldwide to approve that specification even without reading a second draft.Some people including me do find this situation to be extremely damageable both to the standardization processes and the burgeonning digital public sphere.

Some others take a more pragmatical approach, but even that one is very much telling about the whole OOXML farce. In this category, we find the OpenOffice.org project. Despite what Microsoft will tell you, OpenOffice.org does not and will not provide OOXML « interoperability » . It will however provide an import filter that users will be able to use in order to import documents formatted in the format used by Microsoft Office 2007 and 2008 that bears the name of Microsoft Office Open XML(OOXML). What this means is that the OpenOffice.org project has to work directly on the files edited and created by MS Office 2007 and 2008 in order to provide compatibility and does not use the OOXML specification, as it is not implemented by MS Office 2007 and Microsoft Office 2008. So much for interoperability. The jury is still out, by the way, on the search for OOXML implementations. The ones that exist are either broken or else very limited (even the famous Novell plugin).

Sometimes, life can unfold its course like a novel by Borges. Despite the fact that OOXML does not exist , the DIN has invited the Afnor committee to participate in its convergence committee. This committee is in charge of studying the compatibility issues between ODF 1.0 and OOXML. But since OOXML as an ISO standard does not exist, I can only imagine how interesting their work sessions can be:

 « - Say Herr Dingsbumms, what do you think about the capacity of OOXML to rename every existing concept humanity has created so far in its very own way?

That little episode being over now, I would like to tell you about an existing initiative: The Digital Standards Group, of which I am one of the proud co-founders, has published a manifesto called the Hague Declaration. My respected colleague in this group, Andy Updegrove has written a very nice introduction about it.

In short, what does the Hague Declaration and the Digital Standards Organisation stand for? The Hague Declaration ackowledge the growing role of information technologies in the daily lives of citizens, businesses and governments worldwide. This growing importance should not be understimated, and neither should the amount of our rights and civic processes be underestimated too. This is how the Hague Declaration makes the case for the use of openness and freedom in software and networks, and does it by recommending the use of Free and Open Source Software and Open Standards. In fact, Open Standards, more than Open Source, is the focus of the Digital Standards Organisation. It thus calls governments and vendors to realize both the challenge and the opportunity of Open Standards as technology now governs increasing portions of our political, civic, and social lives.

By doing so, the Hague Declaration continues a worldwide conversation that has started with the development of OpenDocument Format. This conversation is far to be over; in fact, it is just starting, and everybody should take part in it, as vendors are rushing to propose evermore proprietary solutions relying on closed specifications, ultimately forcing us to relinquish our control over our data and our rights.

We hope you will join us by signing this manifesto.

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We’re now on the 9 ^th of May and the final version of OOXML is still not be published either by the ISO or the Ecma as they had to do so. This ongoing scandal affects the industry as a whole and proves once again that OOXML has never been an open standard.

The OpenOffice.org project has just released the first « public » beta version of OpenOffice.org 3.0.This first beta version may not support all the expected features that will be included in the stable version but it does give a very good feeling of how the 3.0 will be like. You will find a more detailed list of features on this page. As you can see the 3.0 will sport a number of very interesting and useful features, such as the ability to import PDF documents, switching language inside one document, a new StartCenter, new icons, etc.I wanted to go a bit beyond the list of new features and tell you about the effect that OpenOffice.org 3.0 will have on its users and ultimately on the way we create content share it and stay happily productive in this always-on world.

Perhaps what matters the most with OpenOffice.org 3.0 will not so much be the flurry of new features; perhaps what will ultimately matter is the brand new architecture of OpenOffice.org that has been introduced with this new release. You already knew about the ability to use extensions in order to add features to OpenOffice.org. With the 3.0, OpenOffice.org becomes even more modular, allowing even more interested people to develop their own features on top of the 3.0 platform.In the long run, this completely revisited, rearchitected platform will play an essential part in extending the yield of OpenOffice.org .

The concept of office suite has kept evolving ever since its appearance in the eighties. At first, what mattered was the wordprocessor and the spreadsheet application. Then, Powerpoint came in and started to control our minds, becoming both a tool and a concept. We then learned about the concept of productivity suite, growing the office suite with all kinds of tools, from a PIM module to specific financial applications and elementary document management features.

Today, the paradigm has changed, but it does not necessarily involve the fattening of the whole suite. Rather, I believe that this new paradigm is about creating all sorts of content and sharing it freely. Sharing freely involves two perequisites: The easyness of sharing and the use of open formats, open standards that allow the users to master their own data and content and does not push them into vendor lock-in. This assumption also implies another, subtle point: the boundaries between applications are blurring and the applications themselves become easier to use.What this means leaves some room for interpretation and unveils new, different paths. Let’s see first what these new paths will not be, and second, let’s see what options there are and what are the options Openoffice.org chose.

The new paradigm in office suite rests on the following elements:

• Creation of open content through the use of open and free formats, ideally standards
• Freedom to share and distribute this content
• Ease of use, simplicity

These three elements ultimately make up for an interesting consequence; they don’t just liberate the content and the creativity of users, they also lower significantly the barriers of adoption for people who could never afford this before. In doing so, this paradigm puts forth the urge to enable participation. Ultimately, that’s what office suites should be nowadays: Participation Enablers.

One can understand now why I think MS Office 2007-2008 has already missed this shift of paradigm: The use of proprietary formats and spreading confusion around the concept of openness will not really help in the end. Yet, the latest versions of MS Office suffer from their excessive integration with MS SharePoint, the mother of all office technologies by Microsoft. This CMS/Groupware platform may be very easy to use, but it does create a fortress of formats and DRMs beyond which users are forbidden to go, and share. This centralized process is also very telling of a deprecated mentatlity even before being a compelling offer for certain types of organizations.

The truth here, tools such as SharePoints will fade away, as wikis take the lead. And precisely, OpenOffice.org allows you to export your content in certain wiki syntaxes while choosing directly the server that needs to be accessed. So much for command and control…But lets go back to our topic.

The appearance of online office suites such as Google Docs and Zoho shows a new path and illustrates the shift of paradigm in office suites. Online office suites make it easier to create and share content while making the issues of platforms and applications fall thanks to their online nature. The ability to import and export from and to multiple formats, some of whose being open standards (ODF, PDF) is also present. At the same time, online services such as Slideshare add value to traditional tools.

Nobody wants to have to deal with proprietary barriers of any kind. It is about creating and sharing freely, and ultimately, it is about enabling participation.OpenOffice.org is not an online office suite. But by enabling people to share and to communicate, OpenOffice.org works like a hub for content creation. Its features set covers the full range of functionalities expected by advanced users, and its inherently free nature (in beer and in speech) allows anybody to use it in order to create and share in the easiest way possible.Its extendability not only creates an ecosystem, it creates something more powerful: A community of users contributing to OpenOffice.org in order to serve their needs, and ultimately enriching the codebase.The modularity of OpenOffice.org (turning it into a set of modules running on top of a runtime environment, the URE) also make it possible to turn the overall platform into a RIA (Rich Internet Application) , thus addressing even more use cases.

In any case, OpenOffice.org is on its way to become the hub of your digital content, by enabling freedom; freedom to use, freedom to share, freedome to modify, and freedom to distribute.

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