Category Archives: Open Standards

Early June Links

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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.

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

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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.

Happy Birthday ODF!

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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…

The European Commission is always right. So is Microsoft.

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The European Commission is becoming a thoroughly disappointing these days. Here’s a few examples.

  • The full draft of the ACTA has been leaked (grab it here) and as my colleague and friend Andre Rebentisch has described, the European Commission seems to know very well how to dig a hole for itself and stay in it.
  • Meanwhile the works around the second European Interoperability Framework have taken an interesting twist. Having started on rather excellent premises, different copies of the draft are now circulating, and they appear to have been watered down by the direct influence of the Business Software Alliance.  Open Standards, let alone Open Source, now seem to have been put aside.  When will the Commission learn how to make the difference between the interests of the European people and the Chinese and US economies?
  • It is also interesting to note that the Business Software Alliance and organizations supported by Microsoft have the ears of the European Commission, while Microsoft’s own search engine, Bing, is displaying interesting results on Microsoft’s own competitors. Just look up for OpenOffice.org in Bing, and you will see.
  • Meanwhile it is to be noted that the Commission has also opened a public consultation on the European Interoperability Strategy; it is to be hoped that it will not be a ground for further delay and sterile talk to be ended by the Commission making decisions based on the direction of the wind.

Links for mid-February

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