Moved by Freedom – Powered by Standards

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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Ars Aperta, OOo Postings, Open Standards, OpenDocument Format, Web 2.0

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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Free Software, OOo Postings, Open Source, OpenOffice.org

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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OOXML, OOo Postings, Open Standards, OpenDocument Format, OpenOffice.org

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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OOo Postings, OpenDocument Format, OpenOffice.org

• Alex Brown criticizes OOXML, claims it will not be implemented in MS Office 2010 echoes what many had predicted or knew for years. Perhaps someone’s monthly fee was not sent in time, go figure.
• Microsoft’s troubles in court over OOXML and the i4i patent continue, and it’s serious.
• I used to write that once or twice a year, I found Microsoft actually did some things right. Today, I would like to give a very special mention to its Courier project. There are some good chances that the combination of hardware and software will turn this device into something that is just as closed and proprietary as Apple’s IPad, but I find this one to be actually useful, beautiful, and seemingly quite usable. Kudos for the design, I hope you will not forget to use Open Standards.
• the Songbird media player leaves the Linux platform… sort of. I understand there seems to be some resources problem, but then these guys either have a business model that’s not working out or something else is going on. What does “a version for engineer will be maintained”  mean ? Is that the perpetual beta or a broken, unusable version. And why can’t they fix that? Can someone else do it? Odd…
• My attempts to package the lpOD project for Suse and Fedora have started, but they’re still hesitant.
• I just got interviewed in French by Radio Libertaire on OpenOffice.org and its future, the podcast will be available soon.
• BoycottNovell becomes TechRights and expands its scope. Good luck for this new project, Roy!
• Ars Aperta upgrades its website and welcomes André Rebentisch among its team. André’s short bio is here.
• A message to everyone who lives in SecondLife as well: Penzance’s Connolly Airfield in the Independent State of Caledon needs new maintainers and financial support. Feel free to participate!
• Zaheda Bhorat is back on the web and I must say it’s good to know she’s healthy and active again.

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Ars Aperta, Linux, OOXML, OOo Postings, OpenOffice.org, Second Life, Software Patents