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Links while I’m about to go on vacation

Charles — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 17:24:53 +0000

That’s it, our luggage is ready, tickets are in the bag, schedules have been reviewed at least 10 times… It smells like vacations! And indeed, we’re leaving tomorrow. No more blogging for 2 weeks. But I would not be leaving without a few picks from the Net.

Join us at the OOoCON 2010 in Budapest, we’ll be happy to meet you, the city is beautiful, the conference topics quite interesting (as far as the ones I reviewed)… And don’t forget to register before the 27th of August! More details here.
Just alongside the OOoCON in Budapest, there will be an unique event: the OASIS Interop Demo on ODF. This will be the opportunity for ODF implementations to compete and stress test both the different applications and libraries, but also the standard itself. Ars Aperta will represent lpOD there.
Mark your calendar for the OpenWorld Forum in Paris and attend Ars Aperta’s conferences there. We have quite exciting news coming up for you.
Last but not least, I have to share something that may interest a relatively minor portion of the readers of this blog, nonetheless I won’t refrain from letting you know that upon installing the latest OpenSuse 11.3 on my father’s laptop, I noticed a notable performance improvement of the Evolution Email and groupware suite. However, I still do not understand why for the love of G*d Evolution cannot use multiple inboxes…

Time for vacations!!!

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Links for the end of July

Charles — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 15:35:37 +0000

Can one sponsor sustain a FOSS project on the long term? A crucial question that comes with my crucial answer, this time on FOSSBazaar.
After several articles in the press reporting on the Board of the OpenSolaris sabotaging itself, I wanted to clarify that the OpenOffice.org has fortunately a quite different situation with a clear ideas on who our community manager is, who sits at the Community Council, who does this and who does that. Of course not everything is perfect, far from it. But we do talk to Oracle, although we would hope to be kept in the loop as to where Oracle would like to go in the future with OpenOffice.org…
“Rotten to the Open Core”: a great post by Dave Neary setting the record straight on this insipid debate. And for what it’s worth, let’s remember Free Software means something and is not just nice and fancy brand to be used by everyone.
Steven Vaughan-Nichols is an incorrigible cynic. I’m glad OpenOffice.org is supposed to survive the slow death he predicted to others.
lpOD O.9.2 has been released. Grab it here!
Ars Aperta will be giving conferences and talks at the OpenWorld Forum at the end of September-beginning of October. Please come and visit us!

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Joining the OASIS Consortium’s Board of Directors

Charles — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 11:00:13 +0000

That’s something of an announcement for me. I have to say that I believed all the way during these elections that the odds were very much against me, but I was obviously wrong: I have been elected at the Board of the Directors of the OASIS Consortium. I feel both honoured and humbled by the trust and approval talented professionals and experts have put in me. I will try to show myself worthy of their esteem. To all of you, I would like to express my sincere gratitude.

Together, you and my new colleagues of the Board of Directors and the Technical Advisory Board (TAB) will help not just the OASIS Consortium’s expansion; we will also promote and forward what has appeared over the recent years as the OASIS “model” of standards development: an open, inclusive, professional and no-nonsense approach to standards development, allowing everyone to have a say in a transparent fashion and giving birth to standards that are easy to use, integrate and redistribute with no constraint on any implementor nor distributor. In a word, the OASIS Consortium helps the establishment and expansion of unbiased and sustainable competition in harmony with governmental leadership and authority.

High quality, innovative, ready to use, open and free (in every sense of the word) standards: That’s what we strive for, that’s what we do. And I look forward doing this with you at the Board of Directors. Again, thank you for your support, I look forward working with all the stakeholders of the standards development world. This is going to be exciting.

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See how you can use lpOD with simple examples and tools!

Charles — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 09:53:06 +0000

Recently we have redesigned the lpOD project’s website. This redesign is actually not that trivial, as it integrates entire chunks of the lpOD technology through the last release of Ikaaro. There are also some important aesthetic changes, but that’s somewhat besides the point of this post. I wanted to highlight the fact that we have embarked in an effort to better educate developers on how to use the lpod technologies and develop on them. Because of this we have created some easy use cases for anyone who might be interested in using lpod. We will continue to expand these examples through various initiatives and we hope to be able to share these with them right on the ODF Toolkit website, as the lpod consortium and its leading contributors are now part of the ODF Toolkit Union.

Meanwhile, you can dive right inside the official lpod documentation, which is at this stage covering only the lpod-python part of our platform. Speaking about languages, I can already point our interested readers to an early, development stage version of lpod-perl, currently hosted on the CPAN repository (as this development version is thoroughly unofficial).

Last but not least, here’s where you can get our code, and if you are interested feel free to take a look at our custom ODF News Reader. It agregates the feed from many interesting sources (blogs, websites, etc.), you can export them as an OPML file, and it’s a good place to stay tuned to what’s going on inside the ODF ecosystem.

Enjoy!

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Europe may start to change its stance on interoperability & standards

Charles — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 10:27:43 +0000

This speech, which I reproduce here in extenso, was given by High Commissioner N. Kroes, at the OpenForum Europe Summit 2010 in Brussels this week. While it is not a piece of legislation or policy in itself, it does show a strong display of leadership, vision, and confidence in the European ability to properly implement interoperability in Information Technology. I hope this will ultimately translate into something effective; we will have, after all, five years of interesting backs and forths on this topic.

Address at Open Forum Europe 2010 Summit: ‘Openness at the heart of the EU Digital Agenda’

Brussels, 10th June 2010

Ladies and gentlemen,

Exactly two years ago I spoke about interoperability and standards here in Brussels. I am sure some of you were present at the time – or at least read my remarks. For the others, here is a brief overview:

Interoperability boosts competition and we need more of that.

For devices or applications to be interoperable – to work together – all concerned parties must agree to a common way of “doing things”.

Formal standards are one way to get there.

More transparency in formal standard-setting can lead to more efficient outcomes.

Public and private procurers of technology should be smart and build their systems as much as possible on standards that everybody can use and implement without constraints: this is good for the bottom-line because it promotes competition between suppliers and prevents vendor lock-in.

In other words, as I said on that occasion: choosing open standards is a very smart business decision.

That speech brought a general perspective to my work on competition policy. Today I must apply that thinking in a more direct way, as the person who has proposed the Digital Agenda for Europe. Even though the whole Commission is responsible for its implementation I expect interested parties to mostly turn to me to demand progress – and rightly so.

Therefore let me explain what I have in mind when it comes to the topics of interoperability and standards.

It is not my intention to raise eyebrows today, but I do not apologise if that is the reaction. At my age, one doesn’t hold back!

I will start with a confession: I am still a big fan of open standards. I believe in openness, and I believe in practising what one preaches.

Some observers think “open standards” is a tainted term that should not to be used in the absence of a generally recognised definition. Others act as if a policy document that does not mention “open standards” would automatically lack merit. My position is in between: I don’t believe that listing keywords can substitute for policy. Whatever the labels, what matters is the substance. I would urge all stakeholders to focus on the content of the package rather than the wrapping.

In developing the substantive policy for European standard-setting, it is important to start with a basic question. What is a standard? What does a standard look like?

Almost always a standard will be embodied in a specification; a document that describes and defines the characteristics a device or process or object must have to be an implementation of a given standard. In the case of a formal standard the specification is drawn up by a standard-setting organisation pursuant to a well-defined process. For example, the process should be open and transparent and allow for participation of all interested stakeholders, not the least to ensure buy-in and market acceptance for the resulting standards.

But a standard will be of only limited use for interoperability until many vendors use it as a building block for their products.

Let’s imagine two competing standards that are both technically excellent for a certain task but differ in the level of constraints for implementers. Which of these two standards do you think will see more implementation and use, including for unforeseen purposes? The one that you can download from a website and that you can implement without restrictions? Or the other one which you have to buy, which is restricted to certain fields of use and which requires royalty payments for embodied intellectual property rights (IPR)?

The answer is obvious. And that is why everybody who cares about interoperability should care about the financial conditions for the use of standards as well as the indirect constraints imposed on third parties: the fewer constraints the better.

In reality, there are different degrees of openness between the two extremes that I have sketched out. Likewise, there is a diversity of technical specifications related to interoperability. These range from those embodying formal standards, through to free public specifications, and up to proprietary information.

To cover all those aspects I have proposed five key actions in the Digital Agenda for Europe to

have more and better standards recognised and created in Europe;

to make better use of these standards; and

to improve interoperability in the absence of standards.

So, how to recognise and create more and better standards in Europe?

First, we badly need to reform how ICT standards are dealt with in Europe. Both internal Commission reflection and a wide public consultation have shown that the European standardisation framework is out of sync with fast-moving technology markets. In this context, I am cooperating closely with my colleague Vice-President Tajani. By the end of the year, the Commission will make the necessary proposals for the reform of the European standardisation system. In particular, some key reforms will be of special relevance to the ICT sector.

The standards that power the digital world are made by the economic actors. In Europe only ETSI allows these actors to directly participate in the making of standards. One negative result is that the standards underpinning the emerging universal communication platform: the internet and the world wide web – including standards for content formats – are made elsewhere.

This puts these standards, many of which are truly open – that is to say they do not come with any constraints for implementers – at a disadvantage vis-à-vis European standards when in legislation or public procurement. Just one example: I think we would have been spared some unnecessary fights over the use of document file formats by public bodies in the last few years if there had been a European document format standard already available.

The reform of the European ICT standardisation framework is a simple way to bring relevant standards from non-traditional standard-setting organisations to an equal footing with European standards when it comes to achieving interoperability. I am thinking here of bodies like the World Wide Web Consortium, OASIS or similar fora and consortia. This could be done via a fast-track approval of their standards through a process hosted by a traditional European standards body such as ETSI, or through the assessment of these bodies’ compliance with certain criteria regarding notably openness, consensus, balance and transparency.

Second, we must use all opportunities to promote appropriate rules for ex-ante disclosures of essential IPR and licensing conditions in standard-setting contexts.

I have nothing against intellectual property being brought to the standard-setting table, but it must be disclosed. Any economist will tell you that you can only make a rational decision between different options if you can compare their benefits and their costs. And, let’s face it, establishing FRAND (Fair, Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory) prices is a hard task over which reasonable people often disagree. Transparency is therefore in everyone’s interest – the alternatives are not. Why risk the litigation? Why set a standard in ignorance of the costs of implementation?

In some cases, the choice of a technology in a standard might be obvious in the absence of technical alternatives. Costs and licensing conditions are less relevant in such cases. But in most cases there are competing options and it makes clear sense to also consider this information.

The Commission has already taken an important step by drafting new guidelines on the application of the Treaty’s antitrust rules to horizontal agreements to promote an efficient and competitive standard-setting process that is protected against misuse. The draft, which is currently available for public comment, relies on the well-established concepts of non-discrimination, transparency and availability and specifies minimum requirements that distinguish standard-setting from a cartel.

But I want to do more.

Some standard-setting bodies already have ex-ante disclosure rules, so why not all of them? This is a matter of efficiency in my opinion. And surely, as a matter of effectiveness, when the Commission mandates standards bodies to draw up a standard it should have the right to be more demanding on the standardisation process, to ensure that standards are less demanding when it comes to their adoption. We could also think about enticing other standards bodies to adopt such rules, for example by giving their outputs preferential treatment when approving them as European standards. Finally, why not tie the public financing of standards bodies to the existence of good ex-ante rules?

Let me wrap up this point by making one thing absolutely clear: we want to make standard-setting more efficient, not more burdensome. We don’t want uniform rules everywhere: we want smart rules that are adapted to their respective fields. Standard-setting for software interoperability is not the same as setting a new standard for, say, digital television or mobile telephony. We should have the right rules in the right contexts. The standardisation reform I discussed earlier and the on-going consultation on the draft guidelines for horizontal cooperation agreements will initiate a further discussion on ex-ante disclosure in standard-setting organisations. I am convinced that a more visible role for fora and consortia standardisation in Europe will already lead to many improvements here.

OK, now we have taken care of the standards: they should be available. But what can we do to ensure they are used in a smart way?

Third, we want to help ICT procurers to avoid missed opportunities. Together with Commissioner Barnier and Vice-President Tajani we will draw up detailed guidance on how to analyse a technology buyer’s requirements in order to make best use of ICT standards in tender specifications. This is a complex exercise where the market situation, current requirements and future developments have to be weighed carefully. I am sure many of you could testify from your own experience that the skills of public authorities vary greatly when it comes to this aspect of procurement. Many authorities have found themselves unintentionally locked into proprietary technology for decades.

After a certain point that original choice becomes so ingrained that alternatives risk being systematically ignored, no matter what the potential benefits. This is a waste of public money that most public bodies can no longer afford.

It is even worse when such decisions result in the waste of private money on top. That happens where the public authorities’ decisions force citizens to buy specific products (rather than any product compliant with an applicable standard) in order to make use of a public service. This could be your kid’s school insisting on the use of a specific word processing system or your tax department’s online forms requiring a specific web browser.

If you have other concrete examples you can share don’t hesitate to send them to me. I want to make sure this guidance will be as practical as possible.

Fourth, Commission Vice-president Šefčovič and I want to put in place a new European Interoperability Framework. To be sure, the existing version of the EIF is not bad. It even sets out a list of characteristics of “open standards” within the context of cross-border eGovernment services. However, our work with Member States through the ISA programme and its predecessors has made clear that there is an opportunity to further enhance interoperability between public administrations.

This second version of the EIF is foreseen to be adopted at the level of the College of Commissioners, and will therefore rightly be perceived as of a higher status and importance than EIF version 1. Both the Framework and an Interoperability Strategy paper are foreseen for 2010.

“But what will the new EIF say?” you will ask. Well, the drafting process has not been easy. But I am convinced that its content provides a pragmatic and operational set of principles that will help us all to move ahead.

For me, it is a fundamental tenet that public administrations spending tax-payers’ money should opt for the least constraining solution that meets the requirements for a given need. Such a rule, as the default, would shield public authorities from the dangers of long-term lock-in. It would also ensure competition between suppliers for follow-up contracts and for services. Opting for closed solutions would be possible, but on the basis of a clear justification, rather than because it was the easy option. Several Member States have comparable policies in place, some of which have actually been inspired by the old EIF. For example, the “comply or explain” policy in The Netherlands. In my view the Commission has a unique opportunity with the adoption of the EIF version 2 to reaffirm its lead in this area.

But what do we do when there is no standard? When there simply is a product everybody has to use in one way or another but there is no specification describing the “de facto” standards it implements?

Fifth, with my colleagues in the College I will seriously explore all options to ensure that significant market players cannot just choose to deny interoperability with their product. You no doubt remember that I have some experience with reticent high-tech companies: I had to fight hard and for several years until Microsoft began to license missing interoperability information. Complex anti-trust investigations followed by court proceedings are perhaps not the only way to increase interoperability. The Commission should not need to run an epic antitrust case every time software lacks interoperability. Wouldn’t it be nice to solve all such problems in one go?

Therefore I am looking for a way to ensure companies offer the required information for licensing. We are thinking very hard about how this could be achieved. Any such initiative would probably be limited to certain types of IT products. And it would likely involve some form of pricing constraints.

Whereas in ex-post investigations we have all sorts of case-specific evidence and economic analysis on which to base our decisions, we are forced to look at more general data and arguments when assessing the impact of ex-ante legislation. Just to be clear, while it is still early days, it is certainly possible that I will go for a legislative proposal. This could have a profound impact on the industry concerned so it is not a decision taken lightly. Many of you work for companies that could be concerned by such a measure. I invite you all to let me have your views.

These are the five framework measures we are looking at in order to increase the benefits we can reap from interoperability. Of course interoperability and standards are important concepts across almost all parts of the Digital Agenda. For example, we want to achieve interoperability for cross-border eHealth applications and for smart energy meters. The benefits of these actions will not only be economic, they will also fundamentally shape our future quality of life.

“Will she really be able to pull off all that?” you may wonder. I also wonder, sometimes. But at the end of the day this is a matter of leadership. We can’t change all of this in one year, and there will be plenty who try to stop change. But I still want that change, and I will keep coming back and speaking to you until we achieve it.

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Early June Links

Charles — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 15:24:14 +0000

It’s been a while I haven’t posted anything here (over 15 days!) . It all of a sudden got very busy again for Ars Aperta and here I am again in early June. My apologies to you dear readers, I’ll try to make up for it this month! Some interesting links to visit for this beginning of the month:

Excellent post by Jean-Louis Gassée (French software genius, inventor of BeOS and former Apple employee) on Microsoft’s troubled future.
There is, in a related but previous post, some hope about that though. I tend to agree with Mr Gassée here: I simply do not buy into the whole all-cloud, no-desktop system. It simply does not work no matter how large your bandwidth is. This being said, it will be interesting to see how Microsoft’s strategy with respect to cloud services and office suite evolves. As for OpenOffice.org, you might ask… Well, that one could also end up being interesting as well. But make no mistake on that one: Fat, Monolithic clients are out.
Great post on combining some microformats, in this case OpenID & OAuth. Microformats are extremely important in Cloud contexts and are the most pragmatic tools to fight off cloud and social lock-in by companies like Facebook.
The UK Government promotes open data. If only we could do the same over here…
Don’t miss Steve Job’s & Steve Ballmer’s interview on All Things Digital, starting tonight at 6 pm California time!
Last but not least, OpenOffice.org 3.2.1 is almost out. Last RC is looking good, so be prepared to download it.

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OASIS Board of Directors elections: Vote for Charles-H. Schulz.

Charles — Wed, 12 May 2010 15:27:03 +0000

Dear colleagues and members of the OASIS Consortium,

I have accepted my nomination for the elections of the Board of Directors and I would like to thank the people who nominated me. My name is Charles-H. Schulz and I’m a founding partner of Ars Aperta, a French consultancy providing strategic client assistance on open standards and IT governance.

As a member of the OASIS I have contributed to the ODF Committees and am also serving at the steering committee of the e-government member section. It’s been now over three years that I have been contributing to the OASIS Consortium’s effort of advancing digital standards, and I believe we have some unique value propositions we should seek to push forward and enhance.

The OASIS Consortium hosts, promotes and develops some of the most advanced and comprehensive digital standards. Our unique choice of IPR makes it possible to develop, distribute and use the most secure and stable specifications, and the adoption the OASIS standards throughout the industry is an evidence that we serve an important purpose: To produce the most reliable, versatile, easy to implement and use standards for the digital world.

By electing me to the Board of Directors of the OASIS Consortium you will be choosing someone dedicated to push forward the agenda of open standards that provide an effective answer to real world problems met by industries and governments worldwide. You will be voting for someone who has a first hand experience of the challenges faced by the small and medium businesses, both as producers of standards and as their users.

As a member of the Board of Directors of our Consortium I will also dedicate myself to ensure that the adoption of our standards becomes one of our top priorities; this entails promoting the standards themselves but also growing our presence in large industry fora and public sector’s initiatives such as research projects.

Last but not least, I will help improving efforts such as OASIS Blue that aim to bring our expertise on digital standards in the fields of green equipment for the household and the industry. These fields are promising both by their efforts towards a greener industry and the improvement of the general interest, and also by the economic growth they help to nurture.

Should you have any questions I am available to discuss them with pleasure and interest. I am confident that we can build upon the existing success of our consortium to reach something even bigger.

Charles-H. Schulz.

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Much ado about nothing

Charles — Sun, 09 May 2010 17:46:22 +0000

When I was freshly elected at the OpenOffice.org’s Community Council the Free Software Foundation approached us with a question related to our extensions web site. Basically they felt that we should not be hosting non Free Software extensions and requested we take those down otherwise they would open their own extensions site.

For the sake of clarity, extensions are “plugins” for OpenOffice.org that work very much like Firefox plugins. They extend the feature set of OpenOffice.org and are a great way to grow our community. I should mention that the number of Free and Open Source Software extensions outgrow by far the number of the proprietary ones: They are in fact more the exception than the rule. The Community Council has been working on a press release which we just released and that you can read on this page. I am sorry we could not find a good solution, but we have essentially and respectfully agreed to disagree on a topic which I find quite unimportant. Shortly after I posted the announcement on behalf of the OpenOffice.org project, I received a flurry of emails, both satisfied and unsatisfied, both public and private.

As for my very own, personal opinion, I do have the highest respect and regard for the Free Software Foundation and count myself as one of their most fervent supporters. But I would have hoped that they understand the merit of prioritizing their agenda items and the timing of their actions. When the FSF approached the OpenOffice.org project via our Community Council we were shaken by the buyout of our main sponsor, Sun Microsystems, and had to reassure both our contributors, our users, and perhaps ourselves as well. The request from the FSF caught us off-guard and although we dealt with it with the utmost attention, I could not help but think that the folks over there in Boston must be living in another dimension. I got the feeling they were like a bunch of officiers from the logistics department of an army who would stop everything on the wake of a war just because the markings underneath the trucks have not been properly painted.

Seriously, did they have nothing better to do ? Asking questions on the future of our project? On the ODF standard? On how the new main sponsor thought of its future leadership? On the changing grounds of FOSS vs. proprietary software in the context of the emergence of cloud computing? Really, did they have nothing on their plate besides picking the five proprietary extensions on the OpenOffice.org website and make a whole cheese out of it? Now the FSF seems busy creating another extensions website, which I can’t help finding useful for OpenOffice.org, as it is just a second “app store” for our users and a second venue for our developers. Congratulations, FSF, you know how to pick your fights.

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Happy Birthday ODF!

Charles — Mon, 03 May 2010 17:39:46 +0000

On the Saturday 1st of May 2005, ODF 1.0 became an ISO standard. So as Rob Weir and the ODF Alliance already did, let me wish as well a happy birthday to OpenDocument Format. By this I would like to celebrate the fact that after 5 years, ODF is alive, kicking and growing its market share at a nice rate. But I would also like to thank everyone behind ODF, the engineers, the OASIS consortium, the volunteers, the implementers, and the users. Without you ODF could not exist, and as ODF 1.2 is almost out of the door it’s good to see how much the ODF ecosystem has grown and is growing.

In the ODF Alliance’s whitepaper, you will see an interesting chart that I have included below. What’s interesting is to read between the “lines” of the chart.

What is shown on the chart are the joint evolution of the format development itself, the emergence of an ecosystem of applications using ODF and the rate of governmental adoption. Based on these three trends I’d like to make a few comments:

- Contrary to what some lobbyists have been trying to explain to various types of customers but most openly to governments, there is no difficulty in the fact that ODF, just like any other standard, has multiple versions and that these versions evolve with time. As long as the standard does not stop to be retro-compatible with itself, it’s perfectly normal. Which means in simple mathematical terms, that if ODF 1.0 has X features, ODF 1.1 may have Y features but not only will Y include X, it will also be perfectly possible and easy for an application implementing X to read the X in the Y format.

- Indeed, the rate of government adoption has not stopped. We are now entering a new phase where we see relatively less announcements, but much more deployments, which also means that the governments are now effectively adopting ODF.

- The number of ODF-ready and capable applications and platforms is growing, which is a telling sign of the health of a standard. More than that, the number of software libraries for ODF is growing (check out lpod) for a good example.

- Last but not least OOXML, which is not shown here, has not so far made any inroads and has zero or extremely limited adoption. The reason is simple: the ISO standard known as OOXML is not even stabilized and its main implementer, Microsoft, does seem to have some trouble enabling it in Microsoft Office. The file format with .docx and .xlx suffixes used in Microsoft Office 2007 is but a proprietary and undocumented format with a name similar to the ISO standard does not help with the confusion. This format does not have a strong adoption except when dictated by deployments of Microsoft Office 2007 and it seems that it is becoming a tough sell for governments.

So what is left for us to accomplish? Where will ODF be in 5 years from now?

More adoption, a stronger ecosystem, and a gradual but quick merge of the online realm with the one of the good old office suites, making ODF not just a “document format” but a pivot format of everyone’s data on the desktop and in the cloud. But this story remains to be written…

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Is 90$ a confusingly good price?

Charles — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 16:50:37 +0000

The other day I got somewhat puzzled, like many people by the new pricing of the former Sun ODF plugin for Microsoft Office. There was first this button “free download” that was really pointing to a page displaying a price of 90$ for the dowload. I then went back on it, and perhaps I did not read this page well or they changed something. In any case, I noticed the mention “free download” had gone away, simply replaced by a generic red dowload button and so I clicked on it. What I saw was very different from the odd perception I and many others had gotten.

The dowload page does indeed not bear any mention of the 90$, but allows different lengths of support contract that amounts maximum to 90$ (5 years support). Now you have to purchase this plugin by pack of 100, which obviously changes the price somewhat, but also indicates the plugin is targeted at medium or large organizations, indirectly telling much of what Oracle’s perception of the market of Microsoft Office users interested by ODF is.

I have read several blogs, dents and tweets on whether this 90$ a seat is a really good thing for ODF. Let me bring a very short, simple answer to it: It’s good for Oracle’s revenue. Whether it will work is perhaps too early to tell, but it’s somewhat assumed here that you can dowload ODF compliant office suites, such as Openoffice.org, for free, or choose the plugin, or even choose Oracle’s own commercial support of OpenOffice.org. What we’re witnessing here can be seen as harming the adoption of ODF, but I’m not convinced by this. I will not go over Openoffice.org’s tremendous and continuing growth, nor the development of ODF tools and APIs but I don’t think the Sun’s ODF Plugin, as strategic as it was at the time of Peter Quinn, was much more than an opportunity to try document conversions and different formats. At best, it was a good opportunity to have a conversation with a vendor. At worst, the new price tag might reduce these opportunities. But I think this, again misses the point.

What Oracle is doing here is what Sun should have done all the way back: extracting actual revenues from its expertise on ODF, whether by providing support on Openoffice.org or engaging into large migration projects. To be sure, Sun had such commercial offerings, but because of its internal organization and a certain market configuration, it never realized the potential revenue it could make. The key here is not to monetize on everything for the sake of it. The key is to realize that:

there is no market for OpenOffice.org nor any other non Microsoft Office suites. Surprised? The market as it stands today only applies to Microsoft Office versions. Procurements, measurements, feature requirements are all based on the assumption that one or several versions of Microsoft Office suites will be used and purchased. Until governments or large organizations change their own definition of requirements to stop matching Microsoft Office patterns and similarities, anything between OpenOffice.org to Google Docs will be the underdog and sales strategies embrace a “good enough” type of discourse towards the customer.
there are in fact very few companies customers can turn to that can deliver level 2, let alone level 3 support services on OpenOffice.org . The reason is that the code is complex, the community is complex, and that the technology itself is complex. OpenOffice.org is very much a standalone software suite. Microsoft Office gets sold by licenses, but SharePoint is becoming quickly the new cashcow for Microsoft. So the market is blurred by IT service companies that promise everything in the form of global service contracts but they seldom get reassurance from their own end at the original vendor or any other qualified party. I remember last year a very large IT service company had sold a several million general support contract to a large French organization, ensuring the customer it was able to offer level 3 support on OpenOffice.org. It turns out their level 3 was very much calling me on a Monday morning and asking me grave, but expansive questions, and by doing so they were not even expecting to pay me for my time. Now these guys never paid Sun for an incident ticket, and that’s a practice that should be stopped. The customers will benefit, and so will the people who do the real job. I think and I hope that’s what Oracle is in the process of doing: enabling the monetization of its investment on OpenOffice.org and ODF. Too bad if it’s shocking some people out there.

This being said, it does not rule out that this confusing notion of 90$ a MS Office plugin might prove a bad business decision for Oracle. ODF as a format and as an ecosystem will not be affected (too much) but what I see as a growing concern is somewhat different, yet related: Oracle needs to listen to the community, and not treat it as some sort of fan club. Community engagement means something, and trusting it also means a lot. Not everything can be sold, monetized, especially not people. Let’s hope Oracle will not remain forever silent with us on this.

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