There are over 1,000,000 supported standards, with more being developed all the time. The Standards Blog examines how standards are developed, and their impact on business, society, the world, and the future. This site is hosted by Gesmer Updegrove LLP, a technology law firm based in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. GU is an internationally recognized leader in creating and representing the consortia that create and promote standards and open source software. The opinions expressed in the Standards Blog are those of Andy Updegrove alone, and not necessarily those of GU. Please see the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy for this site, which appear here.
Friday, July 25 2008 @ 01:00 AM PDT
Contributed by: Admin
Views: 128
Back in December of last year, Google posted a brief announcement of a new experiment in online publishing. At first blush it seemed to represent a challenge to the Wikipedia - but with a few differences. Google summarized the concept as follows:
Earlier this week, we started inviting a selected group of people to try a new, free tool that we are calling "knol", which stands for a unit of knowledge. Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it. The tool is still in development and this is just the first phase of testing. For now, using it is by invitation only. But we wanted to share with everyone the basic premises and goals behind this project.
Then the project dropped out of sight, while the chosen authors contributed initial content, and while Google decided whether to green light the project for ongoing support and public participation
This Wednesday, Google lifted the password curtain on its infant knol site, and issued a new announcement. In some respects, the description of the knol game plan (and even the words) are identical to what we read in the original blog entry. In others, they are different, apparently reflecting lessons learned and author feedback received during the intervening seven months. And, of course, there is now the nascent site itself to browse and watch evolve as well.
What you'll see when you visit turns out to be quite different from the Wikipedia - at least for now. Given that until yesterday it was neither available to public feedback nor open to volunteer authors desiring to launch their own knols, what it looks like today will almost certainly be very different from what it looks like a year from now, or perhaps even in month from now. With the door now open to anyone that wants to walk in and the freedom to go in any direction - not to mention ad revenues to be reaped and shared with authors - what we will see will be akin to the Apple App Store for the everyman and woman - not just for developers, but for anyone who can type.
Here's my take on what to expect, how the knol experiment may evolve, and why I think it matters - a lot.
Wednesday, July 23 2008 @ 01:00 AM PDT
Contributed by: Admin
Views: 257
At any one time I'm usually helping set up anywhere from two to five new standards consortia and open source foundations, and the gestational stealth period can be anywhere from two to eight months. That's because the time will vary depending on how much time it takes to work everything out among the founders and recruit the type of starter set of members that you'd like to have to give an impression of inevitability to whatever it is that the founders are trying to make happen in the wider world. As a result, it's always a pleasure to help introduce a new organization that has just emerged onto the public stage, and particularly so when the new consortium's mission is socially relevant.
That's the case with the Alliance for Sustainable Air Transportation, whose mission will ultimately effect just about everyone that reads this blog entry. In a nutshell, ASAT will help US airports, in cooperation with those around the world, make the move to a next generation air traffic control system that will increase safety, decrease congestion, and lower fuel consumption - three goals that certainly anyone would endorse. You can find ASAT's Web site here, and I've pasted the full text of a press release issued last week in at the end of this blog entry.
Here are further details on what this new organization is all about.
Updated: A story on a press event was posted at a Chinese site (in Chinese) on July 22. I've run it through the Babelfish translator, and you can get the gist of the story at this page. I am told by someone local that the story summarizes a high-level meeting at the EIOffice, with representatives of both SAC (the standards National Body for China) and CESI, as well as representatives from many other government agencies, all there to recognize the release of the first office suite to fully support UOF. The story also reports on various agencies that have announced that they will be converting to the new EIOffice 2009 product.
Long time followers of the ODF-OOXML story will recall that there is a third editable, XML-based document format in the race to create the documentary record of history. That contender is called UOF - for Uniform Office Format, and it has been under development in China since 2002, although I first heard and wrote about it back in November of 2006. Last summer, UOF was adopted as a Chinese National Standard, and last Friday the first complete office suite based upon UOF was released. It's called Evermore Integrated Office 2009 (EIOffice 2009 for short), and here's the story.
Saturday, July 19 2008 @ 08:55 AM PDT
Contributed by: Admin
Views: 723
Although I'm a little late doing so, I'd like to add my voice to Amanda McPherson's in welcoming Brian Proffitt to the Linux Foundation. Amanda is the Linux Foundation's Vice President, Marketing and Developer Programs, and posted the official welcome on Thursday at the Linux Foundation Web site here.
As I expect just about every reader of this blog knows, Brian has been the Managing Editor of LinuxToday for quite a few years (as well as Managing Editor of various other Jupiter Media properties: LinuxPlanet, Enterprise Linux Today, AllLinuxDevices, LinuxPR, and JustLinux). If you missed it, you can find Brian's farewell column at LinuxToday here. As he disclosed there, his new role will be to help launch the Linux Foundation's new Linux Developer Network site and project, which Amanda has been already been working on for some time. When it launches, Brian will be its Community Manager and Editor. After almost 8 years at JupiterMedia, there are few people that know every part of the Linux landscape, and those that live, develop and write (both positively and negatively) in and around that landscape as well as Brian. We're both lucky and delighted to have Brian aboard.
I'm particularly happy that I'll be able to continue to work with Brian, as he has been a great friend to me here, linking to hundreds of my blog entries over the last several years. It's fair to say that many of you would never have learned of this blog but for Brian's deciding that what I was writing here might be of interest to the Linux community. I am quite appropriately grateful for his willingness to pull what I had to say out of the fire hose of information that he had to deal with on a daily basis.
I think that what Brian will be doing at the Linux Foundation will be of interest to you, so here are some of the details on what you can expect from Brian and the Linux Developer Network in the near future.
Wednesday, July 09 2008 @ 06:00 AM PDT
Contributed by: Admin
Views: 8,476
Last night someone sent me a copy of a document delivered by the CEOs of ISO and IEC earlier that day to the ISO Technical Management Board (TMB). That documents summarizes the four appeals filed in relation to the adoption of DIS 29500 (OOXML), and provides a response to each claimed basis for appeal. Those appeals, you will recall, were registered by the National Bodies of South Africa, India, Venezuela and Brazil, not all of which have became publicly available. Under the Directives, the next step in the Appeals process is for the TMB to vote on each appeal, with each member being entitled to vote yes, no or abstain on one or the other of the following resolutions, in each case as to each appeal separately:
a) Not to process the appeal further
b) To process one or more of the appeals, which would require setting up of a conciliation panel
If more than one appeal is approved for further consideration, the CEOs recommend that a single panel be formed to address them (I've previously described the ongoing process in greater detail here). The TMB's are asked to vote by August 4.
The recommendation of the CEOs is as follows:
The processing of the ISO/IEC DIS 29500 project has been conducted in conformity with the ISO/IEC JTC 1 Directives, with decisions determined by the votes expressed by the relevant ISO and IEC national bodies under their own responsibility, and consequently, for the reasons mentioned above, the appeals should not be process further.
Those who have been disappointed by how the Fast Track process was conducted will also be disappointed by the reasoning they will find in the document, which can be effectively be summarized as follows:
Tuesday, July 08 2008 @ 05:27 AM PDT
Contributed by: Admin
Views: 1,773
Microsoft has made many acquisitions for many reasons over its history - 122 to date, according to the list maintained at the Wikipedia. Almost 100 of these have been consummated in the last decade, as the company that triumphed in operating system and office productivity software has sought (often unsuccessfully) to achieve similar success in other domains. Other purchases have demonstrated pragmatic "build versus buy" decisions, serving to add functionalities to products that needed them more quickly and efficiently than in house efforts could achieve.
In its earlier days, Microsoft was much more likely to mimic the products of other companies rather than buy them, in part reflecting its engineering-driven culture, and in part its hardball approach to competition. When it did add features this way, it invariably added them for free into its existing products to make them more desirable. The result was often to drive the originators of those features out of the marketplace, since who would buy what they could get for free? Sometimes, the motivation was more desperate, as with the crash development, and bundling, of Internet Explorer in Window, when Netscape threatened to open a critical breach in Microsoft's control personal computing.
If that sounds vaguely familiar, it should, since Google is following the same course, albeit in a kinder, gentler way, as it adds service upon service, all for free, and all in the service of racking up more and more ad revenues. That's disturbing, because when your goal is ad revenues and not great technology, you may not necessarily produce great technology. But as Google's dominance continues to grow, who will be able to credibly compete against it in those technologies, to ensure that innovation continues?
Thursday, June 26 2008 @ 09:20 AM PDT
Contributed by: Admin
Views: 4,556
Regular readers will notice that I've been woefully silent the last few weeks, at first due to having too many irons in the fire, and for the last ten days due to being on a family vacation abroad, returning not till July 2. As a result, I've been not only behind on blogging, but also on keeping up with the news while limited primarily to Blackberry access since I left. But I thought that it might be useful to take a break and share the "Huh?!?" I experienced when I stumbled across this article by Andrew Donoghue at ZDNet while briefly enjoying an island of laptop connectivity in a hotel lobby in Florence. The article is titled, "Microsoft admits to standards ignorance pre-OOMXL" and is based on remarks by Microsoft national technology officer Stuart McKee. Even more incredibly, it bears the following subtitle:
Microsoft has admitted that, despite being one of the dominant names in IT for over 30 years, it had little or no experience or expertise around software standards until the company was mid-way through the process of getting Office Open XML approved by the International Organization for Standardization.
Why "Huh?" Because Microsoft has been playing the standards game, butting heads over prior technologies such as ActiveX, Java and much, much more with the best of them for decades as a member of hundreds of standards organizations. Moreover, it has held many board seats along the way, and has had a staff of attorneys for some time dedicated to standards matters. That staff includes the former General Counsel of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI).
Still, while McKee has over-spun the point by a few hundred RPMs, there is an important point to be made on the subject of Microsoft's standards-related capabilities, as I'll explain in greater detail below.
Friday, June 06 2008 @ 05:44 AM PDT
Contributed by: Admin
Views: 1,547
Last week I sent out the latest issue of Standards Today, my bi-monthly eJournal of "News, Ideas and Analysis." This time around, my topic is what I call "The Open Collaboration Revolution," by which I mean the unprecedented ways in which the Internet and the Web are allowing communities to form around projects of all types. The benefits that can be enjoyed as a result of such collaboration are leading those involved to reevaluate the traditional rights of creators and content owners. What they are realizing is that they have more to gain by sharing than hoarding. The result is a new focus on "openness" of all kinds - not just open standards and open source, but open development, open content, open data and more. The promise held out by these new methodologies and the innovative legal tools that have been created to serve them will, I believe, be truly transforming.
What follows below is the Editorial from this issue, titled Patience and the Possibilities of Collaborative and Derivative Expression. If that piques your interest, you may want to read the deeper dive that I take on openness of all types in the Feature Article for this issue, titled Openness and the Pursuit of Knowledge.
Friday, May 30 2008 @ 05:56 AM PDT
Contributed by: Admin
Views: 9,489
Update: This is an overdue update to this blog entry, noting that a late appeal from Venezuela was received and accepted after the deadline recognized by ISO/IEC. I had thought I would write a separate entry on it, but as it is now old news, I am updating this entry so as not to leave a misleading impression that the final count was only three.
Last night was the deadline for filing appeals to the adoption of OOXML by ISO/IEC JTC 1. This morning, a spokesman for the IEC acknowledged the receipt of a total of three appeals by the deadline, with the third and final appeal being filed by India, as reported by Peter Sayers, of the IDG News Service. I have no news as yet whether the fourth country that planned to file an appeal has decided not to do so, missed the deadline, or sent its letter only to ISO (Peter reports that an ISO spokesman declined to confirm how many appeals it has received at this time. The deadline date is a matter of some confusion, as some National Bodies were under the impression that the deadline was June 2, so it remains possible that a fourth appeal will (or already has been) received.
In other technicality news, the IEC spokesman noted that the Brazil letter had been improperly addressed - duplicate copies should have been sent to the CEOs of both the IEC and ISO - but that this technical irregularity would be waived [Jonathan Buck, the IEC spokesman, inaccurately stated to Peter that the Indian appeal, rather than the Brazilian appeal, had been improperly addressed; the IDG story will be corrected shortly]
More substantively, what happens next? Ironically, "what happens next" is described in the same general and sometimes vague Directives that have caused ongoing dissent in the process to date, and figure prominently in the South African and Brazilian appeals themselves.
Associação Brasileira de Normas Técnicas (ABNT), the National Body representing Brazil, today filed an appeal to the approval of OOXML by ISO/IEC, bringing the current total of appeals to two, with as many as two additional appeals to come, based upon what I have heard from private sources. The text of the Brazilian appeal appears in full at the end of this blog entry, supplied by a trusted source in Brazil.
While this latest appeal overlaps the South African objections in part, it also raises new concerns, some of which are particular to the interests of Brazil, rather than applying to the process as a whole. As a result, it raises not only additional issues, but also ones that present a categorically different basis for appeal as well.
Brazil's objections fall under two main headings, the second of which was also raised by South Africa. That objection relates to the fact that the reconciliation draft of DIS 29500 that was delivered to ISO on March 29 still has not been released, even to the National Bodies. Despite the fact that this release has been requested by many different parties representing multiple viewpoints, no public or private explanation has thus far been given for the failure to follow rules calling for the releasee of the draft within 30 days of the close of the BRM.
“Let me know what you think of the idea of creating an open standards organization for the benefit of the emerging economies” -Venkatesh Hariharan, reacting at Open Source India to the Secretaries General of ISO/IEC recommending the OOXML appeals of India, South Africa, Venezuela and Brazil ...Full Story
• Planning the maintenance of IS29500 [OOXML] Doug Mahugh Office Interoperability (blog) July 25, 2008 - I'm in London this week for meetings with SC 34 Ad-Hoc Group 1 (AHG1) and Ecma TC45....The AHG1 meeting took place on Monday and Tuesday at the British Library. The goal of this meeting was to come up with a set of recommendations for SC 34 regarding the structure and activities of WG4, the new working group to be created for maintaining IS29500. Alex Brown, the AHG1 convenor, led the discussion and wrote the recommendations on the screen while the other attendees all discussed and debated various possibilities....the final outcome of the meeting is available for all to see on the SC 34 web site....After two days of AHG1 meetings, today I attended the Ecma TC45 meeting, also hosted by the British Library. (Thank you, Adam.) We couldn't get started on maintenance, of course, but several of us were here for the AHG1 meeting anyway, so it was a good opportunity to review our plans for participating in SC 34's maintenance plan going forward.
The next step in IS29500 maintenance will take place at the SC 34 plenary in October (Jeju, Republic of Korea), where SC 34 members will make the final decisions on how WG4 will be structured, based on the recommendations from AHG1. ...Full Story
• China's EIOffice 2009 Launched As Challenger To Microsoft Office W. David Gardner InformationWeek July 23, 2008 - There's a new productivity software kid on the block to challenge Microsoft's Office 2007. Not only is it significantly cheaper than the Microsoft flagship, but it combines all office applications into a single application.
The Evermore Integrated Office 2009 is aimed at China's 1.3 billion citizens. The Java-based offering utilizes an XML-based document format called uniform office format, or UOF....
Evermore has shown up at various U.S. trade shows over the years with earlier versions of EIOffice, but hasn't mounted a serious marketing campaign outside China. ...Full Story
• ISO/IEC and OOXML: The judge, the jury and the hangman Venkatesh Hariharan Open Source India July 23, 20082 - Those who have been following the OOXML issue would have noted that India was among the four countries that had appealed against the ISO/IEC approval of OOXML. The next step in this drama (charade?) is that the heads of ISO and IEC have replied to the four countries. The replies
essentially dismiss the claims made by the four countries with studied nonchalance....
The larger question for policy makers in emerging markets is : Who exactly is ISO/IEC answerable to? ...maybe it is time that emerging economies created a standards body of their own with transparent governance structures and a firm commitment to royalty-free open standards....We Indians have had enough of the East India Companies looting our country, and leaving a trail of bloodshed, poverty and famine behind. We have had enough of India being a soft state. If these companies want to sell in India, they better follow Indian rules and obey Indian laws and stop acting against the interests of the people of India....Creating an alternate standards organization will be an exceedingly tough task, but standards are not an area where compromises can be tolerated. Standards govern our lives in a million different ways and the common man and woman deserve to have their standards created in an open, transparent manner that benefits everyone. Let me know what you think of the idea of creating an open standards organization for the benefit of the emerging economies. ...Full Story
• China generates solar-power guidelines XinhauNet/Shanghai Daily July 23, 2008 - BEIJING - China is speeding up the development of industry standards to guide solar-power generation, officials and experts told a conference....China has promulgated 15 national standards for the solar water-heating sector, with another six under development, but there is no related standard yet for solar-power generation, Li said.... The standards for solar generation will cover sectors such as fundamentals, components and materials, generation systems and technological design, Li said. ...Full Story
• Abiword: One Lean, Mean, Word Processing Machine Matthew McKenzie bMighty.com July 23, 2008 - ...While OpenOffice.org does a fine job, however, there are times when a smaller, faster, feature-packed word processing program would be useful. There is another open-source application that fits the bill perfectly here -- and it deserves far more attention than it gets....Its feature set compares favorably to a stand-alone version of OpenOffice.org Writer, and most Microsoft Word users will also find everything they need to do business as usual....One thing Abiword does not share with its suite-based peers, however, is an appetite for disk space or a Sasquatch-sized memory footprint. Abiword, for example, requires about 19MB of RAM at startup on my Windows XP system, while Writer requires more than 50MB....[Abiword] opened a number of ODF and Microsoft Word (binary DOC format) documents without a hitch, and OpenOffice.org had no problem opening ODF and DOC files created in Abiword....a vast gulf exists between the plus-sized office suites and, at the other extreme, useless toys like Wordpad.
Abiword fills that void for Windows users, and it does so amazingly well.... ...Full Story
• Culture clash The Economist July 23, 2008 - WHAT would the technology industry be without standards wars? Like a city without sex, some might argue. But not all fights are winner-take-all battles like the one between VHS and Betamax in videotapes, or Blu-ray and HD DVD in high-definition video discs. Sometimes there need not be a loser, and the din of battle may drown out the real issues—as in the fight between WiMAX and LTE.....
This rapprochement may explain why there is now talk of merging the two technologies, by making WiMAX part of the LTE standard. Even Sean Maloney, Intel’s Mr WiMAX, says “they ought to be harmonised”. Although this is still unlikely, it would not be a bad outcome. Subscribers could then take advantage of internet-like openness combined with the robustness of wireless technology—without having to put up with the inconvenience of two different standards. ...Full Story
• OOXML appeals: Now or never Bob Sutor Bob Sutor's Open blog July 22, 2008 - ...We are now down to a matter of days for the countries on the ISO TMB and IEC SMB to decide whether the appeal process should continue. From what I have seen and heard, most people are extremely pessimistic about the likelihood of this happening. That is, the sentiment is that the conservative bureaucracies that let OOXML get this far will not tolerate any challenge to their process and decision making, and therefore want this appeals business to be killed right now. This, in my opinion, would be a huge mistake.
I think that ISO and IEC are on the edge of a precipice which, if they fall off, will cause them to rapidly lose relevance to IT (ICT) developments in many parts of the world, especially emerging markets. ...Full Story
• Rambus: Monopolization Redux Lee Gesmer MassLawBlog.com July 22, 2008 - Nvidia has filed a Sherman Act complaint against Rambus in federal district court in North Carolina. The allegations appear to echo (copy?) the allegations in the FTC case I reported on recently, where the D.C. Circuit reversed the FTC’s finding of illegal monopolization by Rambus. Can Rambus file a successful motion to dismiss in this new case based on the D.C. Circuit’s decision? Very likely. ...Full Story
There are over 1,000,000 supported standards, with more being developed all the time. The Standards Blog examines how standards are developed, and their impact on business, society, the world, and the future. This site is hosted by Gesmer Updegrove LLP, a technology law firm based in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. GU is an 
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Back in December of last year, Google posted a brief announcement of a new experiment in online publishing. At first blush it seemed to represent a challenge to the Wikipedia - but with a few differences. Google summarized the concept as follows:
