This is not really brand new, but topics of that kind are rarely covered here on DailyKos, so i thought i'll give it a try on a Friday:
On September 23th, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts posted the final version of its Enterprise Technical Reference Model, which mandates office applications that support OpenDocument file formats. OpenDocument is a specification by a consortium called OASIS, that includes members like Hewlett-Packard, Novell, AMD and Intel, Oracle, Dell, even the US Department of Defense is a Member of OASIS. So, whats the story, one might ask? Microsoft is not supporting that standard, and according to MS spokesmen, they never will. Follow me, i'll tell you why, and why it might be important for you to know ...
I'm convinced lots of you people use MS Office applications at work or at home, and most of you know that situation: one fine day you receive a email, a word document is attached, and you can not open it. And sooner or later you figure, it's because that document is from a newer MS Office version than the one you have installed. To read it, you have to upgrade, even if you do just fine with your installed version. And this goes on and on, generating a constant flow of money to a company in Redmond, WA. Or at least Bill Gates hopes so. MS played that game a while now, and it earned good money with it. And thats why hell broke lose in Redmond when MA decided to go for OpenDocument.
A couple of days later, foxnews.com featured a article "Massachusetts Should Close Down OpenDocument" by James Prendergast, who has the following to say about the case:
The broader media usually take little interest in public policy debates about technology, but they're missing a big story in Massachusetts.
The technology trades, blogs and industry are buzzing about a monumental policy shift in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Officials in the state have proposed a new policy that mandates that every state technology system use only applications designed around OpenDocument file formats (search).
Such a policy might seem like something that should concern only a small group of technology professionals, but in fact the implications are staggering and far-reaching. The policy promises to burden taxpayers with new costs and to disrupt how state agencies interact with citizens, businesses and organizations.
Worse, the policy represents an attack on market-based competition, which in turn will hurt innovation. The state has a disaster in the making.
I like especially the last sentence
attack on market-based competition .. will hurt innovation, uh, how scary. And not even remotely true. MA has not decided to use a specific application to be used, but on a file format the application has to support. Thats a huge difference. And that file format is free (free as in "free beer"), everyone is invited to use it. No Patents, not even pending ones, royalty free. Microsoft could implement it easily, considering the available programmer resources, and then they would be in the pool MA picks their applications from, because it would match their criteria then. But they don't want to, for obvious reasons. They want under any circumstances prevent MA from going the chosen path.
Who is that Prendergast guy anyway? At the very end of the foxnews article, one can find:
Jim Prendergast is executive director of Americans for Technology Leadership, a coalition of technology professionals, companies and organizations that supports limited government regulation of technology. An earlier version of this column failed to disclose that Microsoft Corporation is a founding member of ATL. Other founding members include Staples, Inc., CompUSA and Citizens Against Government Waste.
Uh yeah,
... failed to disclose ... that this is a spokesman of a organization lobbying for Microsoft. Honi soit qui mal y pense.
Fox was somewhat forced to put that disclosure under the article, after lots of people complained about the fact that Fox was simply spreading Microsoft FUD without revealing the sources ... (if you don't know FUD: it stands for "Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt" and is a classic Microsoft strategy, as revealed couple of years ago in the so called "Halloween documents", but that's another story)
Microsoft has spread more of his FUD, always with the same arguments:
- it's to expensive for MA: as if upgrades for Windows or MS Office would come for free
- it's just unfair to simply exclude Microsoft: MS wasn't excluded, they did it by themself with the decision to not match the criteria MA has set.
- it's against competition: thats my favorite one. Using a open file format everyone is welcome to implement in it's products, a format that soon will become a ISO standard, is against competition. But using a proprietary format that clearly favors one company with 95% market share is good for competition. And the earth is flat ..
- it's not mature, we spent the last 5 years developing our XML format: could be, that MS spent amounts of time and money to develop these formats. Question is, did they develop them with the intention that others could use them as well easily? On the other hand, OpenDocument was developed together with some very demanding customers. To just pick some examples of customers that are members of OASIS: Boeing is not well known for participating in a standards body, but building a plane requires a truckload of documentation, and the documents tend to be very complicated. Another one is Society of Biblical Literature who needs to deal with large multilingual documents, or the National Archive of Australia, who are interested in long term storage and retrieval .. and they clearly talk about centuries.
- the OpenDocument specification was not reviewed: thats about the same argument as not being mature enough. One thing is the approval by a recognized standards body, but another, even stronger review process is when the specification gets implemented, preferably by different parties. OpenDocument is based on the old XML format OpenOffice 1.x was using, and as OpenOffice (open source) and StarOffice (Sun Microsystems) share the same code base, we count them as one here. But the first one who fully implemented the OpenDocument specification was not Sun or OpenOffice, but KOffice, another open source office suite. IBM Workplace is another on, and it is most likely that Corel is working on a WordPerfect version with OpenDocument support. The MS XML format has no full implementation yet, MS Office 12 is about to be relased next year.
But to get back in the implications of the Massachusetts decision: Everyone can read printed documents, even after hundreds of years or more. But what with files? I don't know how computers will look in 22nd century, but i doubt very much that they will be intelligent enough to reverse engineer all file formats used in the last 100 years .. we're still far away from so called artificial intelligence. In the end it's not only file formats I am talking about, but it's standards. The fact that you can read this right now, regardless if you use Windows, MacOS, Linux or even some Unix version is based on standards. The way your computer talks to the DailyKos server is based on a bunch of standards like IP, TCP, routing protocols, most of them invented be the DoD, up to the web transport protocol (HTTP) and the format of the web pages itself (HTML) .. these are all standard maintained by independent organizations, not companies. The DailyKos server itself runs with Linux, a operating system completely different from your Windows box .. still you can use it with your Internet Explorer, no problems. Standards are a excellent thing .. you never have to worry that the bolt of company A matches the nut of company B.
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Recently the South Korean Anti-Trust Agency had the guts to decide that Microsoft has to unbundle its mediaplayer and messenger products from Windows. Microsoft's reaction: if that decision sustains, it will retreat from the South Korean market. Our way or no way. Of course they have the power and the right to do so. But now imagine, that government would use MS Office, what then? Would nobody be able to legally read older documents anymore?
MA decided wise, and I have deep hopes that sooner or later other governments go the same way, given the example by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.