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Thursday, September 02 2010 @ 07:54 AM PDT
Wednesday, April 21 2010 @ 06:50 AM PDT
Contributed by: Andy Updegrove
Views: 6,429
 When news of Oracle's intended acquisition of Sun Microsystems broke long ago, many people wondered what that would mean for OpenOffice, the most widely adopted full desktop implementation of ODF. But Oracle immediately imposed a company-wide "no comment" policy on that topic, so everyone has been wondering what the answer might be ever since.
So like many others, I expect, I’m trying to get my brain around Oracle’s reasoning in deciding to charge $90 for a formerly free ODF conversion plug-in developed by Sun Microsystems. That downloadable plug-in was intended for Microsoft Office users who wanted to import ODF-compliant documents created, most obviously, by users of the free, open source OpenOffice.org (OOo) version, or of Sun’s StarOffice, the for-sale, supported productivity suite based on the free OOo code.
Moreover, it’s not just $90 you’ll need to fork over – the plug-in is only available in packages of 100.
Friday, August 21 2009 @ 09:02 AM PDT
Contributed by: Andy Updegrove
Views: 6,431
 Mea Culpa. I am uncharacteristically late in commenting on the XML Wars of August, 2009, which have already received so much attention in the press and in the blogs of the technology world. The wars to which I refer, of course, broke out with the announcement early in the month that Microsoft had been granted an XML-related patent. The opening of that front gave rise to contentions that patenting anything to do with XML was, in effect, an anti-community effort to carve a piece out of a public commons and claim it as one's own.
The second front opened when a small Canadian company, named i4i, won a stunning and unexpected remedy (note that I specifically said "remedy" and not "victory," on which more below) in an ongoing case before a judge in Texas, a jurisdiction beloved of patent owners for its staunch, Red State dedication to protecting property rights - including those of the intangible, intellectual kind.
So if this is war, why have I been so derelict in offering my comments, as quite a few people have emailed me to tell me they are waiting to hear? Here's why.
Monday, July 27 2009 @ 05:13 AM PDT
Contributed by: Andy Updegrove
Views: 4,958
  Last week, Microsoft and the European Commission each announced that Microsoft had proposed certain concessions in response to a "Statement of Objections" sent to Microsoft by the EC on January 15 of this year relating to Microsoft's bundling of Internet Explorer with Windows. If you've been reading the reams of articles that have been written since then, you may have noticed that the vast majority of the virtual ink spent on the story has been directed at the terms relating to browser choice. Typically, and as an afterthought, most of these stories have added a brief mention that Microsoft also proposed commitments relating to "another" dispute, this one relating to interoperability.
While the browser question is certainly important, in many ways it is far less important than the interoperability issue. After all - the primary benefit for consumers under the browser settlement is that they can choose their favorite browser when they first boot up their new computer, as compared to investing a few extra clicks to download it from the site of its developer - as they can already do now. Interoperability, of course, goes far deeper. There's no way that you can make one program work the way you really want it to with another unless it comes out of the box that way, or unless you have not only the ability, but also the proprietary information, to hack it yourself. And if both programs don't support the same standards, well, good luck with that.
So what exactly did Microsoft promise to the EC, regarding interoperability? Let's use ODF as a reference point and see.
Sunday, July 05 2009 @ 04:01 PM PDT
Contributed by: updegrove
Views: 5,228
 The dominance of Microsoft's Office in the marketplace would be logical (if frustrating, to those that think that competition breeds better products), if it was simply a matter of developer seats. After all, Microsoft deployed hundreds, and then thousands of engineers to develop and evolve its flagship app over the last 25 years. How could anyone expect a less well funded commercial competitor, much less an open source project, to equal Office for features, performance and interoperability with other office suites?
At the same time, people keep trying - a lot of them. Not just long-established competitors, like Corel, with the venerable and estimable WordPerfect office suite it bought from Novell, open source projects like OpenOffice and KOffice, as well as projects launched by much larger players, such as IBM (Lotus Symphony) and Google (Docs).
WordPerfect aside, most of these offerings disappoint when it comes to round tripping documents with Office users, although many provide perfectly fine alternatives for stand-alone use, particularly by those that don't need to create the most complex business document.
The funny thing is, though, that the quality of the result, and even the ability to interoperate in a world dominated by Microsoft's Office, doesn't necessarily equate to the depth of the resources of the developer. Now isn't that an interesting observation?
Sunday, November 23 2008 @ 08:18 AM PST
Contributed by: Andy Updegrove
Views: 3,954
I Among twenty snowy mountains/ The only moving thing/ Was the eye of the black bird.
II I was of three minds/ Like a tree/ In which there are three blackbirds...
V I do not know which to prefer/ The beauty of inflections/ Or the beauty of innuendoes,/ The blackbird whistling/ Or just after...
  Although much of the brouhaha of the OOXML adoption process has abated, the post-partum process of reviewing how Joint Technical Committee One (JTC1), the ISO/IEC body that gave birth to both ISO/IEC 26300 (ODF) and OXMLISO/IEC IS 29500 (OOXML), continues. More specifically, meetings continue to be held in which a variety of related matters are being considered, including the ongoing maintenance of each standard, and whether and how the Directives that control the deliberations of JTC1 committees might profitably be amended to address the concerns that arose during the consideration of these two overlapping document format standards.
Most recently, representatives of JTC1 and the SWG Directives committee met in Nara (JTC1) and Osaka (SWG), Japan to review these weighty matters. As has been the case in the past, a variety of those directly involved in the ODF/OOXML saga wrote about the results of this latest meeting, including three bloggers who attended the Ballot Resolution Meeting that served as the climax of the OOXML adoptive process: Alex Brown, Rick Jelliffe and Tim Bray. You can find their alternately contrapuntal and contrary observations here, here and here, respectively. I did not attend the gathering in Nara, but I have read the recommendations made at that meeting (as well as Alex's, Rick's and Tim's commentaries on them), and ruminated a bit on the recommendations and the events that inspired them. Here is my own sense of what others have also observed.
Tuesday, October 07 2008 @ 06:01 AM PDT
Contributed by: Andy Updegrove
Views: 4,914
Note: Nominations for the awards noted below will close on October 8, so please act now
I almost missed this story, until I caught a link to it at Bob Sutor's blog. As I was about to do the same and simply add a link to it to my News Picks column, it occurred to me that there's more of a story here than meets the eye.
That said, let's start with the superficial story, as announced in a posting at the ODF Alliance Web site, issued on September 9, which begins as follows (as usual, the full text appears at the end of this blog entry):
Know someone in your community—an individual, government official, NGO or other entity—who has significantly advanced the cause of document freedom, yet whose actions have not received the public recognition they deserve?...The purpose of the award is to recognize the contribution of individuals or entities in promoting ODF adoption, the mission of the ODF Alliance. Here’s how you can help! Nominate an individual or entity you work with closely or someone you have observed who stands out as a leader in the ODF community.
What's remarkable about this story, of course, is not that the ODF Alliance is giving awards to those that deserve them it (why not? It's a great way to advance the Alliances cause as well), but that there are so many people in so many countries around the world that are eligible by reason of their service in support of what was once an obscure software standard. Now, how often does something like that come along?
Saturday, August 16 2008 @ 08:14 AM PDT
Contributed by: Andy Updegrove
Views: 9,779
 As I reported yesterday, the OOXML appeals brought by Brazil, India, South Africa and Venezuela have been rejected by the Technical Management Board (TMB) and Standardization Management Board (SMB) of ISO and IEC, respectively. I have now received the actual voting results for the IEC vote, and an indecipherable screenshot of the ISO votes. I'll hope to add the ISO votes later on when I get more comprehensible information, but in the meantime, here are the IEC results.
In each case, the questions included in the ballot were the same:
a) Not to process the appeal any further
b) To process one or more of the appeals, which would require setting up of a conciliation panel
For each appeal, a board member could vote "yes," "no" or "abstain," with only the yes and no votes counting for purposes of determining whether or not the vote would pass, and a two-thirds vote being required for passage (the "Conclusion" at the end of the voting results cites clause 10.4, Rules of Procedure, as the reference for these rules).
Friday, August 15 2008 @ 09:38 AM PDT
Contributed by: Andy Updegrove
Views: 9,610
Update: For the appeal by appeal details of the IEC Board vote, see this blog entry.
 ISO and IEC have announced the rejection of the four appeals submitted by the National Bodies of Brazil, India, South Africa and Venezuela. The rejection follows on the heels of July 9th recommendation of the Secretaries General of each of the two standards organizations to their respective management boards not to give the appeals further consideration.
Under the ISO rules of process, this now paves the way for the as-adopted version of OOXML, now called IS0/IEC DIS 29500, Information technology - Office Open XML, to proceed to publication. That version is substantially different than the current implementation of OOXML in Office 2007, and its text has still not been publicly released by ISO/IEC. According to a joint press release, "this is expected to take place within the next few weeks on completion of final processing of the document." Intriguingly, the press release goes on to say, "and subject to no further appeals against the decision."
Wednesday, July 09 2008 @ 06:00 AM PDT
Contributed by: Andy Updegrove
Views: 16,171
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:
Thursday, June 26 2008 @ 09:20 AM PDT
Contributed by: Andy Updegrove
Views: 11,297
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.
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ABOUT THE
STANDARDS BLOG
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, 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 organizations 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.
Quote of the Day“ ” -Sample tag in the W3C's Emotion Markup Language, now under development “ EmotionML combines the rigor of computer programming with the squishiness of human emotion” -Stephen Shankland, writing in CNET about EmotionML See all Quotes
Latest NewsW3C Launches HTML Speech Incubator GroupW3C.org September 2, 2010 - W3C is pleased to announce the creation of the HTML Speech
Incubator Group, whose mission is to determine the feasibility
of integrating speech technology in HTML5 in a way that
leverages the capabilities of both speech and HTML (e.g., DOM)
to provide a high-quality, browser-independent
speech/multimodal experience while avoiding unnecessary
standards fragmentation or overlap. The following W3C Members
have sponsored the charter for this group: Voxeo, Microsoft,
Openstream, Google, AT&T, Mozilla. Read more about the
Incubator Activity, an initiative to foster development of
emerging Web-related technologies. Incubator Activity work is
not on the W3C standards track but in many cases serves as a
starting point for a future Working Group. ...Full StoryEmotionML: Will computers tap into your feelings?
Stephen Shankland
CNET.com September 1, 2010 - For all those who believe the computing industry is populated by people who are out of touch with the world of emotion, it's time to think again.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which standardizes many Web technologies, is working on formalizing emotional states in a way that computers can handle. The name of the specification, which in July reached second-draft status, is Emotion Markup Language. EmotionML combines the rigor of computer programming with the squishiness of human emotion....The idea is called affective computing in academic circles, and if it catches on, computer interactions could be very different. Avatar faces could show their human master's expression during computer chats. ...Computers could respond to your expressions as people do. Computer help technology like Microsoft's Clippy or a robot waiter could discern when to make themselves scarce....But there could be a dark side, too, opening new class of worries for those online.
Might a company target you with particular advertising if it knows you're jubilant or despairing?... ...Full Story The Future of the Web Is a Matter of Semantics
Science Daily September 1, 2010 - ...Nikolaos Konstantinou of Athens Information Technology (AIT) and colleagues at the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), in Greece, state that after almost a decade of research, the fundamental concepts that would underpin a semantic web have matured, yet the average web user cannot yet take advantage of their full potential. They suggest that there are three main issues to be overcome before Web 3.0 emerges and they present a roadmap in their paper to explain how these must be addressed:... a lack of simplicity, integration with existing technologies and practices, and adoption by the web industry.
They suggest that ways to automatically add meta data to digital objects are now needed to make it possible to publish semantically rich content without manual intervention regardless of whether the "publisher" is a large corporation or an individual content creator. They also say that semantic technologies do not offer a substitute for current practices, rather a complement to them and that web engineers need not abandon experience but should build on it. Finally, the driving forces of the web industry should adopt semantic web technologies since their adoption entails a series of benefits both for the companies themselves as well as to the end users.... ...Full Story You want WAPI with that? If you think rolling out a new cellphone is complicated in the West, try China, where cellphone vendors and carriers need to not only deal with the mainstream global standards, but with China's home-grown TD-SCDMA standard as well. Oh - and you better include WAPI security as well. Motorola Brings Android to the Ming Phones in China
MobileTechReview.com August 31, 2010 - Motorola today introduced three new devices in China including MT810 for China Mobile's TD-SCDMA network, XT806 for China Telecom's CDMA-2000 network and A1680 for China Unicom's WCDMA network. The devices combine the Android smartphone experience with updated MING features and designs. Here is more info on the new Ming models:... ...Full Story ANSI Launches Pilot ENERGY STAR® Accreditation Program
ANSI.org August 31, 2010 - The American National Standards Institute (ANSI), coordinator of the U.S. standards and conformity assessment system, today announced the launch of a new pilot accreditation program for certification bodies that seek recognition from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to certify products under the ENERGY STAR® Program.
ENERGY STAR is a joint initiative of the EPA and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) that promotes energy-efficient products and practices. Because the ENERGY STAR products program has grown to encompass products in more than 60 categories and is relied upon by millions of Americans, EPA and DOE have put into place requirements for enhanced testing and verification....the EPA requires that third-party accreditation bodies operate in accordance with ISO/IEC 17011, Conformity assessment - General requirements for accreditation bodies accrediting conformity assessment bodies. Accreditation bodies must also be signatories to the International Accreditation Forum (IAF) Multilateral Recognition Arrangement (MLA) for Product Certification. ANSI is currently the only U.S. signatory to the IAF MLA for Product Certification.
The ANSI pilot program is designed to support the ENERGY STAR® Program through the independent, third-party accreditation of product certification bodies that evaluate and certify the activities of energy-efficient product manufacturers.... ...Full Story Royalty-free H.264 may clear way for HTML5 standard
Lex Friedman
ComputerWorld August 31, 2010 - MPEG LA, the firm that controls licensing for a number of video and other standards, announced on Thursday that it will never charge any royalties for Internet video encoded using the H.264 standard that Apple favors, as long as that video is free to end-users....Just as with popular audio formats like MP3 and AAC, video formats aim to find the sweet spot between video quality and file size--they want to get as high as they can on the former, and as low as they can on the latter.
Much of the video on the Web these days is presented via Adobe's Flash technology...many popular Websites have made the move to support HTML5 video alongside or, in some cases, instead of Flash. HTML5 is the latest and greatest version of the Web's core markup language. The new HTML5 standard makes it possible for Websites to embed video that your computer can play without requiring a third-party plugin (like Flash)....the big browser developers couldn't agree on which video format the new tag in HTML5 should use: some sided with H.264, others with a format called Ogg Theora....The MPEG LA group, which owns the H.264 video codec, had declared that it wouldn't charge any royalty fees until 2016, but Mozilla and Opera were worried about what those future costs might be. Should H.264 video become a de facto Web standard in the meantime, the MPEG LA group would be in a position to charge a healthy fee for browser developers to keep using the format.... ...Full Story Alliance Formed to Develop Electric Vehicles
CRIEnglish.com August 30, 2010 - China set up a new alliance on Wednesday to unify standards and speed up the research and development of home-made electric vehicles. China set up a new alliance on Wednesday to unify standards and speed up the research and development of home-made electric vehicles, the Beijing Times reported...The non-profit alliance is made up of 16 state-owned enterprises from relevant sectors, including China's top three oil companies, two top power grid operators, and three major automakers - China FAW Group Corp., Dongfeng Auto Corp., and Chang'an Auto Corp. ...Full Story With Information Sharing, Context Is As Important As Content
Michael Daconta
Government Computer News August 27, 2010 - ...Given that modern development platforms can automatically generate code
to process XML documents, a narrow perspective can affect the exchange
and any code that processes that exchange. The new approach being
spearheaded by forward-thinking elements of the Army and Air Force is
to create the semantics first, via a high-fidelity data model called
an ontology, and then generate the XML schemas from that model.
Although not based on the Web Ontology Language, the National Information
Exchange Model (NIEM) takes a similar approach, in which the XML schemas
are generated from a database-backed data model. The contextual nature
of this approach is that the ontology uses a more top-down, enterprise
perspective to guide the inclusion of bottom-up exchanges. The heightened
awareness and use of context were mirrored on the commercial front by
Google's purchase of Metaweb and the company's Freebase entity graph.... ...Full Story IETF Internet Draft: The Network Trouble Ticket Data Model
Dimitris Zisiadis, et al.
IETF.org August 27, 2010 - IETF has published an updated level -04 specification for the
Experimental Track "Network Trouble Ticket Data Model," which provides
an XML representation for conveying incident information across
administrative domains between parties that have an operational
responsibility of remediation or a watch-and-warning over a defined
constituency. The data model encodes information about hosts, networks,
and the services running on these systems; attack methodology and
associated forensic evidence; impact of the activity; and limited
approaches for documenting workflow.
Details: "The Network Trouble Ticket Data Model (NTTDM) aims to simplify
TT exchange within the boundaries of a Grid and to enhance the functional
cooperation of every Network operation Centre (NOC) and the Grid
Operation Centre (GOC). Community adoption of the NTTDM enhances trouble
resolution within the grid framework and imparts network status
cognisance by modelling collaboration and information exchange among
the operators.... ...Full Story Red Hat Submits Deltacloud APIs as Potential Industry Standard
Joab Jackson
InfoWorld August 27, 2010 - As the industry call for cloud interoperability grows more fervent,
open source enterprise software company Red Hat has submitted its cloud
platform, Deltacloud, to the DMTF (Distributed Management Task Force)
as a potential standard for cloud interoperability....Red Hat launched Deltacloud in September 2009 as a set of open source
APIs that could be used to move cloud-based workloads among different
IaaS (infrastructure as a service) providers, such as Amazon and
Rackspace. To encourage external contributions to Deltacloud, Red Hat
relinquished the Deltacloud code base to the Apache Incubator, a
repository for programs that may eventually be overseen by the Apache
Foundation....DMTF oversees existing standards such as CDM (the
Common Diagnostic Model), DASH (the Desktop and Mobile Architecture
For System Hardware), and OVF (the Open Virtualization Format)... ...Full Story
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