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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 First, Microsoft will try to kill ODF. They can try to do this at two levels: at the level of the OASIS ODF TC, and at the level of the next iteration of ODF, ODF 1.2 (due sometimes this Fall and later to be brought on to the ISO). You can rest assured that Microsoft will exert pressures on the OASIS ODF committees either by attempting to stuff it, or by pressuring players such as Novell, Patrick Durusau, or even Sun Microsystems. One of them is a puppet of Microsoft, bound by heavy investment of Microsoft disguised as a legal and business partnership agreement (Novell), another one made an odd trip not that far from Redmond and came back with a completely new view on OOXML and ODF (P. Durusau), while another one has a strong legal settlement with Microsoft and may not afford to lose it for obvious business reasons (Sun).

 Another way for Microsoft to attack ODF would be to oppose the standardization of ODF 1.2. They will use the same tactics they had with OOXML, but in the opposite direction. It will be funny to watch how the ISO and the national standards bodies will switch all of a sudden to a demanding stance on ODF 1.2, which will only be an iteration of an existing ISO standard. I am afraid we will witness such a shocking twist in the standardization bodies’ attitude. Romania, for instance, might completely change its happy-go-merry stance it had on OOXML (Approve without comments, twice) to an eagle-eye, unforgiving and watchdoggish scowl of ODF (Disapprove with… interesting comments). Heck, they might even use their former “laxist” attitude they had with OOXML as an excuse to block ODF, those masters of cynicism.

 But all this is just one wing of  the pincer movement I am describing here. The other part of the strategy was however clear ever since the beginning. OOXML is the first chapter into an attempt by Microsoft to shove its own technologies to the ISO. Next in line will be XPS. If you don’t know what XPS is, check it out from the source. Yes, you got that right. PDF reloaded. Now with more patents, OOXML dependencies, and legal traps. What’s the advantage you ask? None. But the respectable industry players we saw in every national standards body (understand: Microsoft’s partners) will insist that it will offer them clarity and a potential new source of revenue. This time though Microsoft got really clever: They went where Adobe had forgotten to go for ages, to the printing industry. This time we will see HP really coming out with flowers for Redmond. In France , HP never joined the works of our committee but they got really supporting of OOXML all of a sudden, around Friday night and after somebody  (obviously being married to a woman of Italian descent with a nice hat, blue eyes, brown hair, ) had been given instructions to play nice with Microsoft. What you say, “is the French government bending to the will of Microsoft? Is it weaker than corporations?” Depends whom you ask, who you can contact, and who you supported. Enough said. Back to XPS.

Well XPS is, believe or not, a standard in the making. And since it is being “developed” (ah, the game of mirrors, illusions and appearances) by the Ecma, it will be pushed through the very same Fast-Track process the Ecma has been lavishly endowed to use with OOXML.

 Would you believe me if I wrote that I knew what’s in store after XPS? Let’s bet I know it. After OOXML shall come XPS. And once Microsoft will have locked the whole industry with its document formats, they will try to do the same with multimedia formats. Expect the future Windows Media formats, their proprietary video codecs to follow the same path. Their glue shall be Silverlight, which in turn rests on Windows Presentation Foundation and the .NET framework. The license shall be the famous OSP, effectively barring GPL implementations and leaving many other issues, such as the RAND mode applied on the covered technologies, in the shadows, but always as a critical factor to consider. Novell will follow, as usual, with incomplete and patent-riddled implementations that you will only be able to safely use with Novell products. 

And then? Then,  as Shakespeare once magnificently wrote, then there shall be silence. At last, silence to win, silence to dominate, silence to influence, silence to pressure, and silence to silence them all.   

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It is always easy to claim you could not do this or that because the other guy was better, or that you ran out of luck. But this time, clear evidence has shown that not only any meaningful standardization work was simply impossible, but any attempt to restore sanity or coherence in the process was matched with unequaled pressure by Microsoft.

If you thought you had seen everything about OOXML with the likes of Rick Jelliffe, committees that have been stuffed by Microsoft and its minions to the point where no other choice than approval would be possible, think again. And do open your eyes to one of the greatest scams of computing history. Below are a few examples of what I’m talking about today. But they are meaningful enough.

Germany

In a steering committee of 20 people a vote was taken to answer this question:

“did the process run according to the rules and without irregularities?” 6 answered no and 7 abstained!

http://www.noooxml.org/forum/t-49525/limited-choice-at-german-din

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=2008032913190768

Norway

21 members of the committee voted NO to fast-track this DIS but it was decided to vote yes anyway:

http://www.noooxml.org/forum/t-50031/oil-fire-in-norway-microsoft-buys-another-standards-body

Denmark

The technical committee didn’t agree to change the disapproval vote but it was “decided” to vote yes anyway. The committee S-142/U-34 under Danish Standards could not agree to change their vote from No to Yes.

A couple of hours later:

http://www.version2.dk/artikel/6718 says that the announcement from Danish Standards will not be made until Friday and that the Chair of the committee has been barred from speaking about the result of yesterday’s meeting.

After some Microsoft political intervention to revert this ( the Prime Minister of Denmark is a Microsoft friend ), we have this:

http://www.en.ds.dk/4227

Another political decision, influenced by Microsoft lobbyists.

Malaysia

The Minister of Science, Technology and Innovation decided on Malaysia’s final position on OOXML (”abstain” ), overturning the 81% ”Disapprove” position by ISC-G and TC4.

http://www.openmalaysiablog.com/2008/03/the-minister-of.html

Poland

On March 20, 2008, Technical Committee (KT 182) of PKN was supposed to either accept the recommendation (which was to vote YES for the proposed standard) or not accept it, and thus recommend PKN to vote NO or abstain from voting. Of 45 members, 24 appeared on the meeting. And the votes looked like this:

   * 12 votes supporting the recommandation,

   * 10 votes rejecting it,

   * 2 abstaining to vote.

No consensus has been achieved concerning the recommendation. Thus, the chairman of KT 182, Elzbieta Andrukiewicz, decided to allow the missing members to vote by e-mail during the next 10 days (till the end of March).

The email vote was taken, counting a “no mail sended” as an “approval” !!! Clearly, there was no technical consensus in Poland, but the chairman forced the rules to favour an approval.

http://www.noooxml.org/forum/t-49455/polish-chairwoman-distributes-microsoft-propaganda

http://polishlinux.org/poland/possible-manipulation-around-ooxml-process-in-poland/

http://polishlinux.org/poland/poland-confirms-its-approval-for-ooxml-in-iso/

Croatia

Out of 35 members of TO Z1, 17 sent a vote, and there were three votes for, and fourteen against fast-tracking OOXML, which is relative rejection rate of 82%. Members who voted were individual experts, IBM, CLUG and HrOpen. However, since there were less than 51% of votes, the voting process was declared invalid, and the previous vote holds (”approve” ) !

Microsoft Croatia heavily influenced the voting, arguing that there’s no need for a second round and accusing commitee conveners of incompetence.

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=2008032913190768

http://www.oddparity.org/index2.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=44&pop=1&page=0&Itemid=1

USA

The technical committee Incits/V1 was heavily stacked by Microsoft partners.

http://www.noooxml.org/forum/t-46044/committee-stuffing-also-in-the-united-states:11-microsoft-business-partners

Switzerland

The chairman Hans-Rudolf Thomann systematically blocked the technical opposition to the DIS, virtually deciding Switzerland position himself.

New infamous JTC 1 P-members:

Accepted a few days before DIS 29500 ballot closing, who joined ISO

JTC1 just to cast a “yes vote”:

Jamaica island

Cyprus island

Malta island

Kazakhstan

Lebanon

Azerbaijan

Cote-d’Ivore

Pakistan

http://www.noooxml.org/forum/t-43510/ivory-coast-represented-by-microsoft-senegal-at-the-brm

I do not think that the victory of Microsoft will hinder ODF anymore; because I think that the approval of OOXML as an ISO standard has been gained through pressure, tricks, and countless irregularities. And this will be heard by the whole world. Congratulations, Microsoft. You have cured the deafness of many today.  

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In a world where records are increasingly kept in electronic form,
Open Standards are crucial for valuable information to outlive the
application in which it was initially generated. The question of
Document Freedom has severe repercussions for freedom of choice,
competition, markets and the sovereignty of countries and their
governments.

“We are very happy about the response and activities that teams around
the world have scheduled,” says Ivan Jelic, DFD Coordinator. “Activities
we have heard about range from local speeches and information events
through to prizes being given to governmental bodies that adopted good
policies in the field of Document Freedom and Open Standards. It will
be a challenge to document everything that is taking place today.”

The DFD team will do its best to gather all the media reports,
pictures and stories around this first DFD and collect them on the DFD
web page for reference and future editions of the event. If you have
material about local document liberation activities, please send mail to:

coordination@documentfreedom.org

How you can get active

The Document Freedom Day is a collaborative effort.

You can make a difference by linking to http://documentfreedom.org,
generate your own artworks or use the ones available at

http://documentfreedom.org/Artwork or generate your own.

You could also print out some of the DFD leaflets at

http://www.documentfreedom.org/2008/DFD_Starter_Pack#Leaflet

and give them to your co-workers, family or friends. And if you feel
creative, consider taking pictures or small video testimonials that
show the world what Document Freedom means to you!

About the Document Freedom Day

The Document Freedom Day (DFD) is a global day for Document
Liberation with roughly 200 active teams worldwide. It is a day of
grassroots effort around the world to promote and build awareness for
the relevance of Free Document Formats in particular and Open
Standards in general.

Document Freedom Day is supported by a large group of organisations
and individuals, including, but not limited to Ars Aperta, COSS,
Esoma, Free Software Foundations Europe and Latin America, IBM,
NLnet, ODF Alliance, OpenForum Europe, OSL, iMatix, Red Hat, Sun
Microsystems, Inc., The Open Learning Centre, Opentia, Estandares
Abiertos.

The list of DFD supporting groups can be found
http://documentfreedom.org/Who

The list of DFD Teams is available at
http://documentfreedom.org/Category:Teams

(Local contact for France: Ars Aperta / contact at arsaperta dot com)

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- Rick Jelliffe gets a cold shower by the SQL standard guru. Boy, that must have frozen you up down there. And besides, it’s now Fall season for you. Too bad, huh?

- “Dear Microsoft Office“, a great blog by Julie Watson. That girl has many tricks up her sleeves when it comes to Office suite issues and file format troubles. Way to go, Julie!

- The incredible adventure of the Malaysian who turned out to be an U.S citizen. That happens sometimes with Microsoft employees…

- A shape is a shape is a shape? It’s not a typo, it’s just the Sun OpenOffice.org team who has some problems with OOXML. I’m sure it’s because they’re biased. Anybody who stands against OOXML (also known as the “Everlasting Truth”) should be sentenced to jail! I’m writing this to deliberately confuse the Microsofties I will meet Tuesday at the Afnor. I know they’re reading my blog. It’s part of my secret plan. Mwuhahahaha..

- Talking about OpenOffice.org, here’s a couple of interesting news about the free and standards-compliant office suite. Take a look here and there.

- The invincible John McCreesh strikes again and has now created a Native-Language Confederation Planet for our reading pleasure. Thank you a lot, and happy Easter, John!

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First, we’re modifying the way we handle the copyright of contributors. As you may know , OpenOffice.org has had a copyright assignment system just like many other major Free Software projects out there. The idea is that for practical and perhaps political reasons as well, major Free Software projects require contributors to sign an agreement between them and the project (or the entity stewarding it). This can help in many respects: In case of legal hassles affecting the project, it is expected that an entity grouping several dozens (or several hundreds) of contributors will better be able to fight back and have a better legal standing in a court. It also protects contributors from being sued on an individual basis and it generally brings some coherence, legally speaking, in a project. It may worth to note that on a legal point of view, the only way code is identified as being part of one specific Free and Open Source Software project is by making sure it has the same copyright.

An example of that is the copyright assignment the FSF requests for GNU software projects hosted on the Savannah reporitory. A well-known counter-example of this is the GNU/Linux kernel. The kernel has hundreds of different contributors, and the legal coherence of it is in some way very weak. The refusal of Linus Torvalds to change the licensing scheme (from GPL v2 to GPL v3) is in this regard not the main issue for the kernel to switch to the GPL v3. It is the number of scattered, sometimes even dead kernel hackers who own the copyright on their code and this number make it very difficult in practice, although possible in theory, to change the licence overnight. An important distinction should be made here: In the case of OpenOffice.org (I cannot speak for other projects here but I think it’s the same), contributors do not lose their ownership of the code or content they contributed. Rather, they agree to a joint copyright ownership with the copyright steward who has to have the whole copyright or at least the copyright on the main part of the code.

This system has been improved for the OpenOffice.org project. Non-code contributions have been set free of the joint copyright assignment, and some « legalese » around the spurrious « intellectual property », if it ever meant anything coherent, has been rewritten as well.

Perhaps the most mediatic announcement was not the change in the copyright assignment system; it was, I think, the announced move from LGPL v2 to LGPL v3. Some credit me for having introduced this question first in the public debate. I would not stand to such a claim, although it is true that I initiated a while ago some debate on this question. Readers here shall be reminded that we did not have a discussion to move OpenOffice.org to GPL, because we felt it was an entirely different discussion. Nonetheless, there was a clear support for LGPL v3 during those discussions and remember that -as unpleasant as it looks, it is nonetheless true- Sun being the copyright holder of OpenOffice.org, it could have changed the licence the way it suited its own interests only. That’s true in theory, but of course politics and cooperation with thousands of contributors in the case of OpenOffice.org just cannot make Sun « go mad » without some spectacular circumstances. But who said Free Software was a democratic system? It always was a transparent, inclusive system, a system where everybody has rights, but not a democracy. In this regard, there was some kind of very positive « astral conjunction » that made Sun’s interests and the ones of the community to converge.

Simon Phipps blogged about the main reason he feels we moved to LGPL v3: Better protection against software patents. With all due respect to Simon, I think he misses an even more important reason: Deprecation, dependencies, and ultimately liability. When you look at the adoption of the (L)GPLv3, you might be tempted to follow the trends found by companies such as Palamida. Its adoption is slow and steady. But that just does not mean anything, as it completely ignores the almost mechanical effect induced by package dependencies on the GNU/Linux platform. As soon as the core libraries and the compiler used to compile the kernel (GCC) move to the new version of the licence, the entire set of packages will have to move as well because of the dependency system. Note that in order to start this domino effect, you only need one or two packages: GCC and glibc. And if you care to ask, these two are expected to move in a few months, unless I’m already behind the schedule. Which means, in essence, that while OpenOffice.org may be the biggest piece of software to upgrade its licence to LGPL v3 shortly before releasing its own 3.0 (notice the marketing impact this game of words will have on… the ten people in the know), the whole Linux distributions will eventually upgrade their licences as well.

These news does of course upset Novell, as it is one more move against their brilliant scheme of alliance with Microsoft (« ’till thy death, my beloved master »). In effect, it nullifies the legal threats from the integration of Microsoft’s own intellectual property into OpenOffice.org. If you wonder what I’m talking about, just consider the work that is being done jointly by Novell and Microsoft on the now famous plugins and converters to OOXML. Some of the codes, ideas, and methods, let alone presumed patents will find their way back inside Openoffice.org, in two places. First there will be a full import and export filter developed by Novell and Microsoft in the Novell edition of OpenOffice.org (ain’t that sweet?) that will permeate Microsoft’s intellectual property. Second, there will also be the OOXML import filters that will ship with OOo 3.0 and there certainly is Novell’s IP in there, which indirectly means that there could be Microsoft’s IP included.

Before the release of the (L)GPL v3, only Novell could grant you, lucky you, the complete protection on the code (hence creating a lack of balance among OpenOffice.org, courtesy of Microsoft). Fortunately for us though, the licence upgrade is now protecting OpenOffice.org from the claims of Microsoft and anyone legally affected by them. Patent protection is thus the second major advantage to this upgrade, as Simon rightly pointed out.

But things do not stop there for OpenOffice.org. The Advisory Board is now meeting regularly (although not that often) and is initiating conversations on the future of OpenOffice.org. I think it’s very important to have this venue; every stakeholder should be adequately represented, and matters that are being discussed are of general interest for the OpenOffice.org community. And regardless of the time lapse between the moment things have been decided and the one they are to be executed, it is nonetheless good. Now we are moving forward, full thrust.

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In other news the next OpenOffice.org will take place in Beijing next October. It will be interesting to see new people and contributors there; although I still have to check if I’ll be available in October.

Now, some not so unrelated news: I would like you to meet my friend Pieter. He’s a good friend of mine, leader of the Noooxml movement. He recently bought a guitar, and he is what some call a singer on a mission. Some excerpts:

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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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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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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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