Monthly Archives: July 2008

Microsoft’s road to Canossa

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Who would have believed it a few months ago? Who could tell Microsoft would “clarify” the coverage of its OSP and extend it to cover the GPL and FOSS developers as well as users? Clearly, pigs might actually fly, and Groklaw does think the same way.

As it was not enough, Microsoft also became an arch-sponsor of the Apache Foundation and paying a decent sum of money as sponsorship fees. IIS anyone? And wait, good news never come along. According to the guidelines of the OASIS Consortium, a member of any Technical Committee that is registered for more than 60 days in this committee automatically neutralizes its own IPR and cannot litigate against any member of the said committee, nor against any implementor, nor user of the standard at hand. In that case, that would be ODF. OOXML anyone?

Of course, there are drawbacks; the OSP still has many flaws, one of them being that it only covers the present version of the spec, and that nobody knows exactly what it refers to (Ecma 376?MS Office 2007 OOXML? The grand paraphernalia otherwise known as ISO/DIS 29500?). Another one is that it “only” allows you to implement the spec, and does not cover you if you modify it. Also, the OSP does not and will not change the flawed standardization processes that have led to the creation of an ISO standard called OOXML. In fact, many things are left as they are, and yet, it feels like so many other things have changed in less than a week.

Perhaps what is changing the IT industry is also changing Microsoft? Perhaps the inroads of OpenOffice.org, crowned and adorned several times this year (heck, that’s the year of the 3.0!), the ineluctable long march of Mozilla Firefox, the long agony of the “.doc” that has started with ODF and is only beginning to show thanks to many governments worldwide and more recently, the NATO, perhaps all this, and all the shame and negativity are starting to come back to Microsoft. Am I naive? No. On the long run, Redmond has no other choice to open up or die.

This is where we stand, at the edge of the foam, as the tidal waves of change are soaking up the sands of idleness. Of course, it’s a tidal movement, so the sands fight it off and the waves do sometimes recede. When they do, they usually leave a clear and white track of foam behind them. This is where the industry finds itself, not knowing if it should go back to the illusory safety of the shore or if it should rather take on the ocean, blissfully feeling the call of the horizon and the sweet bites of the fresh water flowing all around it, then going away to better come back.

Oh, there is to be sure much left to do for Microsoft to embrace the competition and change. I have heard today that many out there are still locked into the proprietary platforms trap. An example of this is what’s happening right now at the Bank of China. This bank recently upgraded its systems to what appears to be an all Microsoft environment. As a result, its customers are only able to perform their banking operations through the good old Internet Explorer. Wake up, folks. We’re in 2008 and such things should have stopped a long time ago. But I don’t see the lock-in effect being lift up by Microsoft any time soon.

So I was thinking that perhaps the good way to end up this post was to point to the excellent Michael Tiemann’s blog. I think Michael has devised some excellent proposals to Microsoft, and I could only wish for the same goals Michael is prescribing. Until then, I feel I should as a gracious gesture apologizing for my latest post about the OSP and the RAND license terms. What I wrote was absolutely true at that time, but I shall now leave it to Microsoft the duty to correct the impressions Ben Henrion and anyone who asked for the license terms for OOXML got when they received the answer from Redmond’s legal department.

The road to Canossa has just started…


Redefining Openness (with lawyers)

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Ah, there we go! The surprise of the day really comes from -would you have guessed it?- Microsoft. Just for your record and under the auspices of Rick “Talking-in-the-wind” Jelliffe, (no offense, Rick), I hereby declare that… OOXML is still unavailable ! (drums and trumpets follow).

But wait, there is more, and I really have to share this with you, as I think -bear on with me now- that the Microsoft folks I had the dubious privilege to sit around with at the Afnor, these good folks, well, I think -hold on a minute- I think they have not told us all the truth. Or rather, they have been fooled, tricked by some faceless, evil genius looking for trapping us all. Yeah, that’s it, they’ve been fooled , cheated on, and they are now the victims of a senseless “misrepresentation of the reality” as we say when we wear suits, ties and all. No, that does not always work in Texas. But whatever.

So what did happen? Well, here’s the story: One of the editors of the Noooxml.org website, Ben Henrion wanted to obtain a copy of the licensing of OOXML. It is actually a little known fact that there are several, (three) ways to obtain a license in order to use, implement and redistribute OOXML (ah, I got you confused there, I see. Wait, you ain’t see nothing yet. ). One of them is the OSP, the Open Specification Premise covering several Microsoft Technologies. It has been deemed widely insufficient by the SFLC, the legal branch of the FSF. In fact, some go as far as claiming that OSP has never granted anything. That’s why somebody like Ben went to look for the other ways to obtain a license for OOXML. What happened is that he wrote to the legal service at Microsoft and asked them a copy of the patent license, which is supposedly a RAND-Z license. Remember that despite its name, “reasonable and non-discriminatory” licenses do not play well with Free and Open Source Software. In fact, they don’t play at all, but that’s what some people would like you to forget. Anyway; Ben waited for the answer. None came. He wrote them a second time. And the answer he got that time was this: “You will have to go to your own legal counsel to receive the terms.”

Now that’s an open standard of the open kind, open as in “open, but not open”; “open but actually quite closed” “open but get out of here”, open as in “open to the good old boys”, open as in “open to your money and to our profits”, open as in “open deception”. And of course, who thought OOXML could be that open? I’m sure the rest of my colleagues at the Afnor will be left in shock and awe when they learn the news. Everything they ever truly believed in , OOXML, was never thought in those terms. I can’t wait for XPS, guys, we’re going to have tons of fun, really. I am also waiting for Microsoft’s possible, albeit unlikely, explanation to this. I’m laughing so hard I’m about to roll on the floor.

I will keep you updated with more details as they surface and hopefully with the whole email thread soon. Meanwhile, we, the ODF authors, are thinking about charging 15 Euro cents per ODF document written, formatted and exchanged over the Internet. For the rest, such as implementing the ODF standard, just let us know. We’ll know how to find you and make the necessary… arrangements. Hell, innovation does have a price after all.

Reading list for a rainy July day

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Have fun this week-end!

Adding Netvibes to the mix….

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Not so long ago I had written about some online tools I’m using daily. I have to update my position on some aspects of what I had written earlier. I had first explained that I was using three different online feedreaders, ( Blorq, Google Reader and Rojo) as I was maniac, unable to decisively decide myself for one among them and perhaps a bit out of fantasy as well.

A few days ago, I received an email from Six Apart, the company that had acquired Rojo in the first place. Although they were not specific, they were announcing that Rojo was taking a new path and would no longer be a feedreader, so users had to basically pack up and export their OPML files and feeds. So I found myself left with two services instead of three. But lunacy cannot be cured that easily. This is how I found myself looking for… a third service replacing Rojo!

And there starts the interesting point: I had shunned services such as Netvibes or BubbleTop. My reasons for this were mostly due to their interface, that is, their way of organizing information and feeds. I found that displaying them in squares or “bubbles” was not the most convenient method. What I also found was that for some reason when one feed would be clicked on some window would pop up (all this, of course, inside the website interface) and the feed or the whole article would be displayed, barring the view on the rest of the feeds. This is still true for BubbleTop. But ever since the latest version of NetVibes “ Ginger”, I believe that something akin to a “Copernician” revolution has happened inside the NetVibes interface.

What has changed -unless I got that wrong- is that despite the interface works pretty much like before, each time one clicks on a feed the interface switches to a different frame where the content is displayed on the main section while the other entries’ titles are listed on a panel on the left. In short, the whole information works like before as an overview (squares and boxes of categorized feeds) but once you want to read any of them it basically becomes an interface that is similar to the one of Google Reader or Rojo. And that is something that made me start using Netvibes.

Now, I also realize that Netvibes is a lot of other different things: customized homepages, widgets, development platform, etc. But although I might be using only one portion of its service I really enjoy it. Thanks to Nick Barcet for the nice tip!


The month of the zombie standards

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OOXML…. It’s been a long time I had not blogged about it. Well, there are news, and not of the mundane kind. As a starting point, always assume that despite what you are about to read everything is normal and OOXML (the ISO standard) has still not been published . That’s it, everything’s normal. Even Alan Bryden, the ISO Secretary General says it , « everything is normal » sounds more and more like a sequel of a not so well standardized HAL computer.

Recently, we had the opportunity thanks to the Noooxml website to review what is believed to be the OOXML specification that should be the ISO standard (ISO/IEC 29500). The result is astounding. This is like zombie movies where the story gets worse every two minutes. OOXML now sports a whooping 7228 pages a different set of sections, and many other changes.

But confusion does not stop here, otherwise there would be no fun: Regardless of the actual availability and authenticity of that document, the appeal process started by several national standards boards has suspended OOXML.

Another «leaked document » has appeared on the wikileaks site (looks like it’s the season) . This one comes from the IEC (remember, it’s yet another standards development organization) and is about the fast track process. It basically summarizes the expected benefits of this wonderfully attractive process. It’s a bit complex but I really like the fact that this document goes back to the basics concerning the Fast Track process. For instance, the document goes on to explain that a fast-track process implies a certain level of quality of the specification at hand, which was not the case for OOXML. The document could also lead to the conclusion that the Fast-Track process is not so much the problem than the upstream specifications being submitted through it (read: the Ecma and its standards).

But this just came in: The official document reporting on the TMB meeting (the ISO meeting where the four appeals against the Fast Track Process has been released to national bodies and consequently to the Afnor. What does it conclude? Aside being a lavish ode to Microsoft, it is a quite complete document, with copies of each of the four appeal letters. The ISO decided to leave the question of the validity of the appeals to the national standards bodies; but its recommendation is quite clear:

“ Recommendation

20. The processing of the ISO/IEC DIS 29500 project has been conducted in conformity with

the ISO/IEC JTC 1 Directives, with decisions determined by the votes expressed by the

relevant ISO and IEC national bodies under their own responsibility, and consequently,

for the reasons mentioned above, the appeals should not be processed further.”

Ah, here we are back in 2007, in the good old summer 2007 where everything for the ISO was fine. Everything works just fine, there’s nothing to see, so mind your own business folks. Worldwide fraud, four appeals for a standard that has “been conducted in conformity with the ISO/IEC JTC 1 Directives” pressures on governments standards bodies, one investigation on OOXML led by the European Commission… and appeals “should not be processed further”?

Somehow I think we have missed one thing or two with the ISO. I don’t exactly know what it is we missed. Perhaps it was a better understanding of how they work. Perhaps it was money. Perhaps it was just all about taking them out for a walk and show them the world before they all got brainwashed. Or more seriously, perhaps it was all about understanding something that was somehow missed ever since beginning: ISO considers its mission and the question of standards in our global economy in a very different way that somebody like me or like my colleagues at Digistan and OpenForum Europe do. The ISO just thinks that the more standards there are, the better it gets. I am part of the people who think that relying on Free and Open Standards in many areas of our economy is an excellent things, and thus standardization process should be improved . But what I stand against is lowering the bar and allowing the quality to worsen just because one major industry player wants things to run its way. And there you find the conundrum of standardization: should standards be the fruits of closed-door industry consensus or an open process emphasizing quality and relevance while allowing fair and unbiased competition? I think the latter should prime in today’s economy. The former only reinforces large trusts and established monopolies.

But all this will be quite interesting to watch as the works around the EIF 2.0 have started and they do not seem to appeal to Microsoft & friends. Expect them to assault the IDABC and every other commission’s directorate out there. Remember, they are like zombies…