Andy Updegrove, Author at ConsortiumInfo.org - Page 43 of 75ConsortiumInfo.org

OOXML, ODF and UOF: What’s Up in China?

8/17/2007

Microsoft has seemed to be flying high in the Peoples Republic of China lately. Bill Gates spent several days in Beijing earlier this year in meetings with high-level officials, after hosting Chinese President Hu Jintao the spring before at Gate's own home. And legitimate copies of Microsoft products appear to be at last gaining ground in comparison to pirated copies, albeit at the price of discounting them to almost unimaginable levels (students can now reportedly obtain a Windows/Office bundle for the incredible price of $3). Many credited Microsoft's pragmatic decision to accept Chinese realities and not insist on having everything its own way.

Others, though, wonder whether the Chinese are smiling all the way to the bank, taking everything they can get, and giving little in return. David Kirkpatrick asked that question in the title of his April Fortune piece, titled How Microsoft conquered China: Or is it the other way around? Kirkpatrick hitched a ride on Gates' April trip to Beijing, and witnessed the rock star status and high level access Gates enjoyed. In the end, Kirkpatrick concluded that both sides are doing just fine, thank you, even if China may be doing a bit "fner."

But perhaps not. One story I've been following in China for some time is the development of China's own home-grown open document format standard, called UOF (for Unified Office Format). Now, two stories involving UOF, OOXML and ODF have appeared in the last ten days in the English language version of the state-owned Xinhua news service that provide an interesting temperature reading on the warmth of the Redmond-Beijing relationship. (You can read more about UOF here and here.)

At Kin Bineola

8/15/2007

I'm currently hiking and camping in New Mexico and Utah, which explains this off-topic post. I'll continue to cover big news when I'm able to access email, and will also upload and time-phase these entries for posting when I come into town for gas and supplies. To find more of this type of writing based on past trips, look to the folder link at left titled Not Here but There: A Wilderness Journal.

I did not visit the ruins of Kin Bineola the night I arrived nearby, but made camp and turned in instead. August is the month of thunderstorms in the Southwest, and especially in New Mexico. By midafternoon, the anvil shapes of thunderheads were spreading in the four corners of the sky, and not long thereafter grey skirts of rain began their slow descent to the parched earth beneath them. Thunder rumbled richly across the valley, and the sky acquired a rich assemblage of angry grey clouds, towering ivory domes blushed with gold by the setting sun, and a double rainbow arching overall.

I dislike tents. I rarely use them in the Southwest, and revel in the stars above. Usually, there is no rain and never are there any noxious insects to annoy, unless you choose to lay yourself down by the rare, still waters. But this trip, I should have known better and brought one along, as nature has made its habits known here for long enough that I should not have expected it to make an exception just for me.

So there was naught to do but rig my ground sheet up as a rough lean-to against a barbed wire fence, and listen to the pit-pit-patter-pit of rain from dusk to midnight as the occasional thunderstorm struck a glancing blow, scattering droplets via gusty winds as it passed in the night, and illuminating the valley floor in sudden bursts of light as it rumbled by.

In the Lands of the Anasazi

8/13/2007

I'm currently hiking and camping in Nevada and Utah, which explains this off-topic post. I'll continue to cover big news when I'm able to access email, and will also upload and time-phase these entries for posting when I come into town for gas and supplies. To find more of this type of writing based on past trips, look to the folder link at left titled Not Here but There: A Wilderness Journal.

When you think of spectacular Native American ruins, you're likely to first envision the magnificent cliff houses of Mesa Verde, and their cousins in the Four Corners region of the Southwest. But there are less-well known and equally dramatic sites that can be found near the intersection of Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico, with the grandest to be found in and near Chaco Canyon.

These buildings were constructed at the same time as the cliff houses, but they are more mysterious. While Mesa Verde and the other cliff ruins in canyons throughout the region were clearly once habitations, the purpose(s) of the "Great Houses" of Chaco Canyon is ambiguous. For example, they contain many rooms, like the cliff houses, and the circular kiva chambers as well. But unlike the cliff dwellings, fireplaces and granaries are very few. If they were dwellings, then, where did they cook? And where did they store their food?

Many archaeologists today therefore believe that the Great Houses of Chaco were not full-time dwellings, but rather some sort of cultural centers, acting as gathering places for a more distributed population. This, despite the great size of the buildings, with hundreds of rooms, and their impressive height - some are as tall as five stories. Indeed, the buildings raised by the Chaco culture were among the largest buildings in the world at their time. And like the cliff dwellings, they were all built – and then abandoned - at roughly the same time.

OOXML Approval Vote Fails in INCITS

8/10/2007

As I reported on July 23, INCITS, the US balloting body on the OOXML vote, put out a ballot to see whether the US should vote to approve OOXML, with the ballot to close on August 9. That ballot has now closed on schedule, and there is a public link that shows the vote - which failed, with 8 in favor, 7 opposed, and one abstaining. As I noted previously, a vote of 9 in favor would have been required for passage. That number is a simple majority of the 16 INCITS Executive Board members that have voting privileges on this ballot (in fact, the Board has 18 members, but due to attendance rules, only 16 of the 18 had voting priviliges on this ballot).

There is a second leg of the vote, which also failed: out of the total number responding (in this case, all 16), the abstentions (one) are subtracted, yielding a number (fifteen) of which two-thirds (in this case ten) would need to be in the affirmative.

The link above includes links to the individual comments filed by eleven Executive Board members.

Another LinuxWorld Press Release (this one’s from the Linux Foundation)

8/08/2007

LinuxWorld does tend to bring out the press releases, and here's one more. At the end of this blog entry you'll find one issued today by the Linux Foundation (a related article by Elizabeth Montalbano of ComputerWorld can be found here). As you'll see from the release, I'm taking on a more formal role at LF in addition to being an At Large Board member and outside counsel. And I'm very pleased to share the news that Karen Copenhaver, who many of you will already know as one of the best known national experts on open source licensing, is also joining the management team. We're both keeping our day jobs at our respective firms (Gesmer Updegrove LLP and Choate, Hall & Stewart LLP), but each of us will be spending substantial time assisting LF and its mission in our new roles.

I'll be providing a special focus on the standards side of LF's work, while Karen will be providing particular expertise on open source licensing. Together we'll be collaborating on legal and overall LF strategy as members of the senior management team. It's a great effort to be part of, and a privilege as well, given the crucial role that both open source and open standards will play in the future of software, and the fact that each needs the support of the other. The Linux Foundation is unique in being the crucible in which this peaceful and productive coexistence is being perfected.

A Standards Game for a Summer’s Day

8/04/2007

There is no question that all over the world the competing interests in the Open XML standardization process are going to use all tactics available to them within the rules. - Microsoft's Director of Corporate Standards Jason Matusow

Those on both sides of the ODF vs. OOXML competition are always accusing each other of spinning and misrepresenting each other's actions and statements. It's fair, and even important, for both sides to call each other out on actual misrepresentations, since the public is rarely, if ever, going to have first-hand knowledge to rely on. But when one side calls the other out, how does the public know which one to believe?

That's where what historian's call "primary sources" come in – not second hand regurgitations and repackagings of what someone else said, but the words themselves that someone said or wrote, straight from the source, complete and unedited.

Right now, you're hearing all manner of second hand accounts of what's going on in Portugal, South Africa, Switzerland, and other places around the world as the Fast Track process for Ecma 376 (the specification built on the Microsoft Office Open XML, or OOXML, formats) winds to a climactic finish. But which side should you believe, when you can't be in the room to hear what was actually said, and by whom? Is one side really consistently making misrepresentations, or is that just FUD spinning by the other side?

Interestingly, I've often found that the farther afield you go from the center of the conflict between ODF and OOXML (and therefore the farther you are from public reporting and scrutiny), the less careful people become. As a result, in such places the public statements made more closely match what you hear second hand from the US and European bloggers, because the chance of a call out is less. But why believe me? After all, this blog post is about primary sources.

Well, here's a chance for you to make your own judgment, based upon a primary source rather than a subjective call-out. That primary source is a statement posted by Microsoft SA (as in South Africa) at a PR site called MyPressportal, urging the South African National Body to vote "yes" on OOXML. The version below is complete and unaltered.

Massachusetts Falls to OOXML as ITD Punts

8/01/2007

[Updated: You can view the comments at Slashdot on this blog entry and story here.]

In a not unanticipated move, Massachusetts announced today that Ecma 376, the name given to the Microsoft Office Open XML formats following their adoption by Ecma, would be acceptable for use by the Executive Agencies of the Commonwealth. The announcement was made even as it appears more questionable whether the National Body members of ISO/IEC JTC1 will conclude that the formats are in suitable form to be granted global standards status, and despite the fact that the ITD received comments from 460 individuals and organizations during the brief comment period announced on July 5.

Most of those comments, "addressed revisions made to the Data Formats section [of the proposed changes to the Enterprise Technical Reference Model, or ETRM], specifically the inclusion of Ecma-376 Office Open XML as an acceptable document format for office applications along with the Open Document Format (ODF)." That number is several times the input received in connection with the original draft of the ETRM in August of 2005 that originally included ODF but not Microsoft's OOXML.

The decision was posted today at the Information Technology Division's Web site in a statement attributed to Henry Dormitzer, Undersecretary of Administration and Finance, Interim Commissioner, Department of Revenue, and Bethann Pepoli, Acting Chief Information Officer. That statement read in part as follows:

The Commonwealth continues on its path toward open, XML-based document formats without reflecting a vendor or commercial bias in ETRM v4.0. Many of the comments we received identify concerns regarding the Open XML specification. We believe that these concerns, as with those regarding ODF, are appropriately handled through the standards setting process, and we expect both standards to evolve and improve. Moreover, we believe that the impact of any legitimate concerns raised about either standard is outweighed substantially by the benefits of moving toward open, XML-based document format standards. Therefore, we will be moving forward to include both ODF and Open XML as acceptable document formats. All ">comments received are posted on this web site.

The "Fair and Balanced – let someone else decide" decision by the current administration and interim CIO Bethann Pepoli stands in sharp contrast to the positions taken by predecessor CIOs Peter Quinn and Louis Gutierrez, backed by then governor (and now-presidential hopeful) Mitt Romney. Both Quinn and Gutierrez insisted on including only "open standards" in the ETRM, and withstood significant pressure from Microsoft to give ground and accept OOXML prior to its adoption by ISO/IEC JTC1.

Update on the US Vote on OOXML (and What Happens Next)

7/23/2007

Updated 2:30, July 23: INCITS has just issued a brief press release (reproduced in full at the end of this blog entry) which includes the following statement:

“The INCITS Executive Board has not yet determined the U.S. position on this ballot,” said Jennifer Garner, Director Standards Programs for INCITS. “In accordance with INCITS policies, details of board discussions are not public. However, the committee expresses appreciation for the large number of stakeholder inputs received and acknowledges that full and careful consideration of the comments will take some time.”

As you will recall, V1, the INCITS Technical Committee that addresses document format standards, was unable to reach consensus on a recommended US vote to either approve or reject DIS 29500, the draft ISO/IEC standard that describes Microsoft's OOXML formats. As expected, Microsoft is seeking to gain a US vote in favor of OOXML nonetheless by escalating consideration of its formats to the Executive Board of INCITS, which has the final say on the matter, subject to the formality of final endorsement by ANSI, the American National Standards Institute, of which INCITS is a member.

What will happen next will be complex procedurally, and will be difficult for journalists to follow, particularly since the steps that will be taken between now and the end of August that will result in the final US position will not be visible on a current basis. At the same time, there will likely be statements made and interviews given by various parties (most or all of whom will have a stake in the outcome) throughout this time period, each giving their particular spin on events as they transpire.

For this reason, I conducted an extensive interview over the weekend with an individual that is a member of both the V1 Technical Committee as well as the INCITS Executive Board in order to learn the steps that have been agreed upon to finalize the US position, so that we may all make the best sense of what we read and hear between now and the conclusion of the comment period. This individual has attended the meetings and conference calls in question in both V1 and the Executive Board, and is well versed with the procedures of INCITS, ANSI and ISO/IEC JTC1, as well as an employee of an IT vendor member of INCITS. In this entry, I will describe in detail the balloting process that I am told will follow from this point forward, as well as speculate on what the ultimate decision will be, based on events to date and the composition of the INCITS Executive Board.

Jason: A Little Help Please?

7/19/2007

I'm a bit mystified by a reference to me in a post that Microsoft's Jason Matusow added to his blog yesterday. In that entry, Jason states in part:

The general discussion in the media and blogs has been about the vote itself, but Rob Weir from IBM came out with some comments that really should be addressed. Rob points out that membership in the V1 committee has changed in the past month, and the insinuation is that it is somehow inappropriate that companies and individuals would show up to voice their opinion. What’s particularly troubling is that this isn’t just happening with INCITS/V1 but Rob seems determined to question the motivations behind national body membership in Spain, Portugal and Italy as well. So let’s take some facts into consideration.

Participation Hypocrisy:

IBM and ODF advocates (ODF Foundation, Andy Updegrove…) repeatedly have called for mobilization of those who opposed Open XML.

I'm having a bit of trouble following Jason's reasoning here. Indeed, it's true that I have called for individuals to write to the Massachusetts ITD - in response to an ITD request for public comments - to make their feelings known on ODF and OOXML in a situation where those comments impose no obligation on the decision makers to accommodate those that offer the comments.

But I fail to see how where the hypocricy comes in (on my part), when Jason equates that conduct with what appears to be a global phenomenon of sudden interest by Microsoft business partners, that have heretofor taken no interest in document format stnadard setting, in becoming eleventh hour *voting* members of National Bodies that will determine whether OOXML is adopted as an ISO/IEC JTC1 global standard. In the former case, those affected are letting those that can make decisions know of their feelings, while in the latter, a select group seems to be intent on (how to say this delicately) stuffing the ballot box.

Am I missing something here?

South Africa Fulfills Promise, Votes “No” on OOXML

7/19/2007

Karl Best of Kavi sent me a link this morning to another national body voting report, this time from South Africa. According to a blog post at by James Archibald, the South African Bureau of Standards (SABS) has voted 13 to 4 not to approve Ecma 376/OOXML. The blog identifies SABS member Yvonne Ndhlovu as the project leader for the local leg of the process, and the source of the infomation. The more detailed tally of the vote, according to Ndholovu, 2 votes of yes, with comments; 2 votes of yes, without comments; and 13 votes of no, with comments. No information is given as to the nature of the comments, or the likelihood that the comments relating to the no votes would be capable, or likely to be accommodated in a later step of the process

The blog entry goes on to state:

A source close to the voting process speculated that Microsoft might still attempt to cripple the process bureaucratically before the vote is taken internationally in September. Ndhlovu added that the comments were being collated and would become available in about three weeks. Potlaki Maine, Microsoft's South African technical officer was unavailable for comment as he was out of the country.

The apparent decisiveness of this particular National Body vote is less of a surprise than might otherwise be the case, given that South Africa is one of the nations that has experienced a stormy experience with document formats in the past. As I reported back in February, the SABS warned that if harrassed by proprietary proponents of standards, it would no longer abstain in voting, but would vote against the standard in question. The following is the verbatim text of a protest that the SABS filed with ISO/IEC JTC1 on February 20, 2007 (National Body Contribution ISO/IEC JTC 1 N 8494, titled South Africa Comments on the PAS Process):