Moved by Freedom - Powered by Standards

It’s time to wake up. It really is. Google has decided to pull out of China (more or less) and the reactions of the press have been so far quite interesting, to say the least. I will not go over these events in detail. Shortly put, Google claimed it underwent a series of alarmingly advanced attacks on its infrastructure (and its GMail service). These attacks appeared to have been led by Chinese crackers working for the government of PRC.  Google made the public move to declare it would pull out of the Chinese market, something that is considered as sheer insanity by some and a smart, calculated move by others.

I tend to think it’s a smart and calculated move by Google, as it was, among other things, noted that the company has a rather weak market share in China. By leaving the Chinese market it will not lose much, and will gain a lot of credibility and positive outlook that Microsoft has been working hard to undermine. The reaction of Steve Ballmer to the story is quite telling, and now he looks like the Borg again. But what I am quite amazed at is the amount of hypocrisy seen in the media about this issue.

Certainly, there is more that meets the eye when it comes to Google and PRC. But this story should have been the opportunity to remind the Free Market Integrists (the ones who believe Free Market actually exists and that we live in an ideal world - many of them, interestingly, were patented communists thirty years ago) that China does not play by the rules of the Free Market. China does not want to play by these rules and has slowly imposed its own rules, special labor laws, low currency, local joint-ventures, and now, a special Internet behind a Great Wall. Most companies fail to see that they will eventually lose, if that’s not already the case for some of them (the French Alcatel and Thomson companies are blatant examples of such “soon-to-be-departed” companies) and that only a few will survive a system they may have contributed to define, but one that automatically creates fierce competitors by the will of one government.

Google, for good or bad reasons, has decided it would stop to gleefully agree to whatever the Chinese leglislators would dictate, and only a few commentators have so far realized the change it has been compared to any other companies.  For the record, I am actually quite admirative of China, its culture, and how it managed to lure Western industries through greed into thinking that what they were going to get by outsourcing/working in China would automatically be a success. To some, it’s even become a duty, although they overlook the evergrowing lack of balance in our trade equilibrium with China.  Ideology has been the sickness of the twenthieth century. In our times, I am afraid ideology is still very prosperous.

But let’s go back to Google and China: Do not be shocked by Google’s move; rather, we should perhaps think at what kind of double standard in business, ethics, and politics we have to set when dealing with PRC. I am disappoined that few have noticed these skeletons in the closet, but I guess a pink elephant is always more visible than they are.

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This will be the last post of the year 2009.  2010 will be an interesting year to come, for many reasons, and that’s why I have outlined a few predictions below for the year to come. Feel free to comment or add to this list, and happy new year 2010!

• OpenOffice.org’s market share will ceased to be constantly looked down upon by analysts. I had recently explained why measuring its market share is complex, and why it is constantly underrated. But now it seems that Microsoft (and the press) are taking good notice of the fast-growing adoption of OpenOffice.org by, well, pretty much everyone out there.
• Standardization of the most recent release of OpenDocument, the 1.2, will be painful, and might perhaps never see a happy ending. For one thing, Microsoft controls the ISO through seemingly fortuitous and massive participation in every national standards bodies forming the ISO, and the ISO’s JTC 1 seems to have decided that the world should be content with some sort of ODF 1.1 “plus plus”. Note that this ODF 1.1 is not a bad thing in itself, but it is very much the result of connivings against ODF and everything non-Microsoft. You never should bite the hand that feeds you, after all…
• The lpOD project, already well underway, will be a success and might become one of the main references for the ODF ecosystem.
• Second Life, the largest online virtual world or metaverse will have to innovate again, or will lose its customers progressively to the new show in town, “Blue Mars“.
• It’s almost becoming a cliché, but cloud computing will again be part of the hype in 2010 and gain a strong momentum on the market. Among many challenges, there is the fundamental need for portability and openness of the users’ data, its control by these very users, and more generally the increasingly clear divide between centralized and decentralized data architecture. In the end, this will become political, and as important, if not more, than the freedome to code and its sharing.
• In the aftermath of the Bilski case, there seems to be a consensus that the criteria for “software patentability” will be much more demanding in the U.S. Of course, a few illuminated curmudgeons inside the European sphere of power, influenced by pro-patent lobbieswill fight hard to implement software patents in its whole horror. But in the end, what we need to do is not being satisfied with raising the bar on patentability criteria, we need to get the message straight and clear that software patents are not acceptable anywhere. ACTA anyone?
• Arch Linux will continue its growth among technical and power users (I’m one of them) while Ubuntu will stagnate (unless Canonical opens its online media store), OpenSuse somewhat loses users, Fedora will grow its userbase, Mandriva will make a strong comeback if they manage to secure their business. How do I know all this? I’ve been in the Linux distributions business, punditry and expertise for quite some time (since 2002, actually) and if there’s something you can count on over the long term, it’s… the Distrowatch billboard. This thing has never proved to be really wrong. I’ll cover more of these topics in 2010. Meanwhile, have a great New Year’s Eve and a happy new year to you!

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• Sun shareholders approve Sun’s merger with Oracle: I hear Jonathan Schwartz did not show up to the meeting; I don’t know why, but it sure is a sad moment. Not because of Oracle (it makes things quite interesting) but because Sun is very likely to go away, and with it a whole part of I.T. history. I am glad to have known a lot of people at Sun, and look forward working with them again in their new company.
• Oracle or not Oracle, OpenOffice.org is busy. Not just with the preparation of the next OOoCon that will take place in November, but also with some serious work on the OpenOffice.org’s interface. Before you say anything, here’s something you should know: it’s not an attempt to design a ribbon; take a look at it very carefully, you will find some very nice concepts.
• The European Commission has published an interesting whitepaper about ICT standardization. This seems to have left Jonathan Zuck confused.  Lots of good things, but at the same time, I feel the software patents clique has never been breathing so close to the Commission’s neck: when will they accept that Royalty-Free (RF) is the only acceptable term for ICT standards? These people need the equivalent of a “patent subprime crisis” to show the revenues they make on “Intellectual Property Rights” rest on nothing but wind and wild speculation while harming pretty much everyone else in the industry, citizens and the advancement of science and technology in general.
• Did Microsoft speak too fast when it announced its contributions to the Linux kernel? Check this out!
• In an Earth-shattering announcement, Claws Mail brings its second micro-release of the 3.7 branch out in the wild. Enjoy without moderation.
• Last but not least, the ODF Toolkit’s DOM component has been released in its version 0.7. You can grab it here.

Stay tuned (although I won’t be close to my computer for most of the month of August)!

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I may surprise many of the readers of this blog, but as the title puts it, this blog is about how Mono does not matter anymore. Actually, I believe it stopped mattering 24 hours ago. But let me go back quickly on the last weeks and the come-back of Mono in the debates of the Free Software community.

It started with one Debian developer explaining why he thought Mono was a pretty good choice technologically-wise and not at all the patent-trap that those extremist punks with beards usually think it is. Actually I enjoyed reading this blog (for all the links check out OSNews and BoycottNovell) as it was very credible at least on one point: Mono is, for the best or the worst, essentially important for Gnome developers. Very few developments happen with Mono as the gateway from the Windows environment to the Linux one, and the ones that did happen have so far never been conclusive. Mono is very much present inside Gnome, pushed and shoved by Miguel De Icaza and Novell who seem to work hard at making Linux the constant second platform behind Windows (Why will remain up to everyone to figure out). So instead of having become this “Switzerland” of software platforms, Mono became a sub-level glue for Gnome, while being judged legally unsecure except by its own authors.

But let’s go back to the blogosphere. The discussion started once again, but this time with an acute political intensity, which prompted several major distributions to make a public statement about the Mono issue. Fedora/Red Hat (the other big Gnome contributor) decided to scrap Mono out of its own Gnome in its upcoming releases, Debian stuttered and then didn’t decide anything, while Canonical took a pragmatic stance and declared that if someone had a patent on Mono, that someone should better come out in public and stop the fearmongering. Add to this a comical episode about TomBoy and Gnote that illustrates well the Mono dependency hell: why code light when you can code with Mono?

… And all of the sudden the elephant in the room, aka Microsoft, started making a strange, rumbling noise in the background.

Microsoft essentially declared that most of the Mono core was clean by publishing its community promise on CLI and the C# language. Is that good news? It is good news because it’s always good to know that Microsoft is embracing competition and openness. Their promise is pretty good, although it does not clear up GPL implementations from any threat. Some of my readers will think that I can never be satisfied, but here’s the thing: I’m reading the FAQs, and as much as I have to say that there is progress, we’re still not there yet.And by the way; Bob Sutor and many others would love to see the same kind of promise applied to Linux, it would not hurt anyone. 

Anyway, who should care about this? Gnome developers mostly. The rest of us have gone out of the .Net and Java wars after around 2004 or 2005, and have realized that there other realities such as Qt and Python (to name just a few), and most of all, there is the Internet, and the POSH (Plain Old Simple Html), and that new little Linux distributions launched by Google… And so much more.

Mono and .Net is one of the last schemes from an outdated behemoth; both the scheme and its inventor will soon fade in blissful irrelevance. It does not mean it cannot sting back though….

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Dear Readers

As many of you know, Ars Aperta has been active in standardization ever since its inception. Shortly after starting our business in 2006, we realized how critical a standard like OpenDocument Format would become for the ICT world.
By creating an effective, xml based format for office documents, the OASIS Consortium has not only developed an alternative solution to the office format imposed to the market: It has set a defining moment, after which both the industry and the ICT users were no longer forced to use closed and unreliable formats, but instead had the choice between those and an open and sustainable standard. For the qualities of OpenDocument do not just lie in its technical capabilities. OASIS-developed standards are among the best ICT standards around, thanks to the contributions of world-class experts and a constant, steady work towards the advancement of the state of the art. OpenDocument is the first standard to be called “open”, because its intellectual property regime, as much as its development processes and inclusive nature allow the contributions of the largest number of stakeholders and have been thought to design an unique alternative that will help drive the ICT industry towards a more sustainable, open, and interoperable era.

I am grateful for all this to the OASIS Consortium. It would be pretty difficult to return the favor to this honorable institution, but today I would like to contribute something back by taking one extra step. I am running as a candidate for the election of the Board of Directors of the OASIS Consortium, and I intend to serve the OASIS together with my colleagues for the benefit of the whole ICT community: software vendors, users, governments, citizens, integrators, developers, etc. All have their importance, and every single one of them can be an OASIS stakeholder.

What can I bring to the Consortium?

First, it is important to realize that we are standing at a turning point for standardization. The way ICT standards are developed today may not seem much different from the way they were just ten years ago, but standardization processes are facing an increasing pressure from various players and emerging, collaborative ways to develop common sets of protocols and formats among I.T. experts. It is no mystery that several technological revolutions have changed the ICT landscape in the last few years: Free and Open Source Software brought, among other things, the fundamental demand for transparency, users and developers’ rights and the quest for uncompromising quality in code. Collaborative methods have shown that they were not so much methods than a succession of epiphanies based on the careful observation of the power of people sharing their skills and knowledge in a networked mode. Last but not least, the network gave birth to an economy of abundance of knowledge, which in turn made possible the appearance of ad-hoc, online standardization teams working on specific technologies designed to provide the answers to technological problems. All this does put a strain on traditional standardization methods; we may want to think how best to adapt ourselves to them. The time of ICT standards designed by and for the sole benefit of their authors is now over: We must accept the fact that the normative power previously devolved to a few has now become inherently distributed across the Internet. We must also realize that although standards should always been designed in order to solve one identified set of problems, we develop standards not just for our own benefit, but for the benefit of all; and by its ubiquity, the Internet and Cloud computing made this an even more stringent reality. In short, our industry is changing, and we have to embody this change ourselves, for our constituencies, our peers, and our communities.

Second, our demand for uncompromising quality in the standards our consortium develops relies not just on the best will of our men and women, but on effective tools and adequate answers to the everyday’s work going on inside our technical committees. We should make sure we continue along the path that the OASIS Consortium has taken a few years ago, by using and integrating our wikis more effectively in the OASIS website and improve the access to collaborative tools and documents repositories. More to the point, we should help the various committees developing and using online conformance and test tools. These tools should be easy to access, reliable and transparent for the sake of peer review and efficient work inside the committees.

Third, we should explore new potential markets. Standards form an integral part of many industries; but as the usage of ICT grows exponentially across industries that were previously thought immune to the field of ICT, so does the need for digital standards. In this area, the OASIS consortium has already a position that is strong enough to put us in the front seat of this standardization field, as we focus on developing xml standards that serve entire vertical markets.
But this is a mere stand only, and we should strengthen it by not just focusing on xml standards, but expanding our reach to encompass markets that strive for sustainable digital standards. By doing this, we will not just protect and grow our reach across the standardization field, but we will also serve our constituencies and the ones who will come after us in developing unique standards for tomorrow.

I will be happy to work on all this with my colleagues at the OASIS, and also with you, members of the broader Internet community: Citizens, small and large businesses, government, developers, and others. If you are a voting member of the OASIS consortium, don’t forget to cast your ballot this month, it is important. If you are outside the OASIS voting members category, you can help too: By communicating around you about this election, by finding out if you know people at the OASIS and telling them about this project that I believe is comprehensive, pragmatic and at the same time, I hope, inspiring.

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