In a case of strange political timing, governor-elect Deval Patrick announced 15 transition team working groups the day before Thanksgiving, while most people were leaving their offices and homes early for the holiday. In that announcement, Patrick named 200 people to a wide variety of advisory groups covering topics as diverse as healthcare and civic engagement. One of these committees is intended to advise the governor on the technology needs of the state government.
Most of the eight people on that group were not a surprise. They include:
- Co-Chair, Charles SteelFisher, New Media Director of the Deval Patrick Committee
- Co-Chair, Richard Rowe, CEO of Rowe Communications, and with many credentials in education, government and technology
- John Cullinane, Principal, The Cullinane Group, the founder of early software success story Cullinet Software, Inc., and a long-time New England technology leader
- Louis Gutierrez, the outgoing State CIO and Director of the Information Technology Division (ITD), and now with government IT consulting firm the Exeter Group
- Keith Parent, CEO of Court Square Data Group, a western Massachusetts-based IT services provider with a number of government customers. (Parent's appointment helps fulfill Patrick's campaign promise to provide regional representation in his administration)
- David Lewis, a consultant and the Massachusetts CIO prior to Peter Quinn
- Larry Weber, currently Chairman of PR services firm W2 Group, and another local high tech legend as the founder of the Weber Group, which became the largest technology-focused PR firm prior to being acquired by the Inter Public Group in 1996.
Oh yes. And one person from a major, out of state software company. Say what?
In an excellent example of "better late than never," Corel Corporation announced this morning that it's next release of its flagship Corel WordPerfect Office suite will provide open, view and edit support for ODF – and for Office OpenXML (OOXML), the format submitted to Ecma for adoption, as well. The announcement states that the new functionality will be just a "first step towards a comprehensive set of functionality for both formats," but does not specify what actions might follow, or when.
Corel was one of the original ODF committee members at OASIS, the developer of ODF, and attended a strategy meeting of ODF proponents at an IBM facility in Armonk, NY ion November 4 of 2005, but then declined to commit to support ODF. Instead, it adopted a "wait and see" attitude.
In its announcement this morning, Corel is positioning itself as a neutral in the current format competition between Microsoft, on the one hand, and a band of disparate allies on the other that support ODF: Major vendors IBM and Sun, each with an ODF-compliant offering, various proprietary and open source office suite vendors that support ODF, Google (with its Writely-based on-line services), and a variety of other supporters most easily identified by viewing the membership list of the ODF Alliance.
The slides are now available for the Chinese standards/open source conference I wrote about on November 8. The most interesting news I learned there was that China has been actively developing its own open document specification, which it calls Uniform Office Format (UOF). You can now see the full UOF case study presentation by WU Zhi-gang here.
The full index of presentations may be found here, and it's worth taking the time to scroll through the various slide sets. If you do, you will see Chinese perceptions and strategies relating to open standards and open source software developed quite fully by government officials, professors and the development community. The following excerpts, for example, are taken from a presentation by Guangnan Ni, a member of the China Academy of Engineering. Note how the points made weave together Chinese strategies as diverse as increasing intellectual property protections for the benefit of local industry rather than simply as a concession to foreign interests, promoting the development of domestic office suites through development and adoption of open document formats, and benefiting domestic industry through the power of government purchasing:
1. Promoting Legal Copy of the Software is Advantageous to Innovation in Software Industry
In order to promote independent innovation in the software field, China has strengthened the protection of IPR. On April 10, 2006, Chinese four Ministries jointly dispatched a request to all homemade PC manufacturers in China to pre-install legal copy operation systems. It is important to point out that, this action is not simply to reply to foreign requirements of strengthening protection of IPR.
The next basic software to eliminate piracy rapidly may be the Office Suite. Recently, in China the number of people involving in developing Office software may be only fewer than that of US. After the governmental support during the period of 10 th 5 Year Plan, many homemade Offices have realized their breakthrough, such as Evermore Office, WPS Office, Red Office, etc. They have entered the governmental market in big batches.
Q: What will happen next?
A: As originally planned, early adopter agencies will begin using converter technology to save documents in ODF format beginning in December of this year, thus meeting the goal of beginning the rollout of …
I'm remiss in blogging on the transition in Massachusetts as Louis Gutierrez leaves his position as State CIO (Gutierrez announced that he would resign a month ago), and as Mitt Romney wraps up his single term as governor and looks forward, he hopes, to bigger political games than our small state can offer.
Gutierrez, you may recall, resigned because of the failure of the state legislature to approve the IT funding that the Information Technology Division (ITD) required to continue its long overdue upgrade of systems and services, including the implementation of ODF [Update: I've just had a conversation with someone at the ITD, who assures me that the ODF transition remains on track. I'll blog further on this within the next couple of days]. The grim impact of that failure is well reported by Catherine Williams in last week's MHT: after the legislature adjourned on July 31 without approving the funding, 27 contractors were promptly laid off, and thirty IT different projects were terminated. 100 more contractors will be let go in December.
Gutierrez summarized the process more graphically in his letter of resignation:
IT innovation in Massachusetts state government ran out of steam in August, when the legislature closed its formal session without action on the IT and facilities bond. I am presiding over the dismantling of an IT investment program - over a decade in the evolution - that the legislative leadership appears unwilling to salvage at this time. I am therefore asking leave to relinquish my posts.... I have no remaining expectation of timely legislative action, and no continued appetite to watch the IT investment program lapse.
Gutierrez will be returning to the Exeter Group, an IT consulting practice in which he has previously been a principal. Whether he expects this to be a temporary or a long term home remains to be seen, but his past record is primarily a succession of challenging, hands-on positions in large and complex organizations in both the public and private sectors.
Once upon a time, there was something new called "the Internet," and it was an unknown quantity. While some guessed what it could become, most did not. Famously, Mark Andreessen - of Mosaic, and later Netscape fame - and Tim Berners-Lee did, while Bill Gates did not. Less publicly, those that helped to create something that came to be called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers - or ICANN - did, and the standards analogue of Bill Gates - the International Telecommunications Union - or ITU - did not.
The result was that ICANN came to control a small but vital piece of the Internet, called the root directories, while the ITU, a venerable global telecommunications standards organization existing under the aegis of the United Nations, and tracing its origins to 1865, did not, although perhaps it could have laid claim to those essential elements had it appreciated their future importance at the time.
And that road not taken, as Robert Frost once said, has made all the difference.
The almost haphazard way in which the future control of the root directories of the Internet was decided has become almost the stuff of legends (one of many versions may be found here). By some lights, the ITU would have been the logical home for the directories to reside, but regardless of your favorite interpretation of the actual events, that was not to be, and the ITU lost out.
Last week I was a keynote speaker at a conference in Beijing convened by the Chinese National Institution of Standardization, and learned quite a bit about the objectives and strategies of government and private industry in the PRC for utilizing open standards and open source software. I'll blog at a later date on many of these topics, but today I'll focus on just one: the news that the Chinese have developed their own open document format.
Here's what I learned at the conference, and what I've been able to find out since. I'll start with the basic details, and then offer a few thoughts on the significance of the news.
What UOF is: It's called the Uniform Office Format (UOF), and it's been in development since January of 2002; the first draft was completed in December of last year. It includes word processing, spreadsheet and presentation modules, and comprises GUI, format and API specifications. Like both ODF and Office OpenXML, it is another "XML in a Zip file" format.
From what I understand, UOF was developed with less compulsion to follow the lead of Microsoft Office and its fifteen years of accumulating features, allowing UOF to be simpler rather than slavishly faithful to (and therefore constrained by) what has come before. I'm also told that the UOF format is based on existing Web standards, such as SVG. I believe that the presentations from the conference will be posted at the CNIS site sometime this week, and I will post the link to the UOF Case Study presentation of Mr. Wu Zhigang when it is available, which contains additional technical details.
For more than 200 years, moderns have sought to divine the life stories of the ancients through the practice of archaeology. Through such efforts, we can learn something about the quotidian existence of not only those prehistorians that left no written descriptions of their daily lives, but also of our more recent forebears, who rarely saw fit to tell us what they ate for breakfast or which penny dreadfuls and broadsheets they liked to read.
Of course, archaeology permits us at best to see through a glass very darkly. Not only are we limited by the vagaries of what has survived through fortuitous chance, but by the fact that few materials used in daily life are designed for long-term survival under harsh conditions. As a result, not much has been consistently preserved from before the last millennia other than a limited number of works of art, personal adornment and handwritten books, records and plays. For more, we must grub around in the ruins of palaces and hovels to see what has survived the unforgiving embrace of dirt, or search about in the more preserving, but much less accessible, chilly depths of the sea.
Hence, the farther back we look into the past, the less we are likely to find, and the more limited are the types of artifacts we can hope to discover. For a few hundred years of history, we may discover glass and metal, crockery and bones, and (particularly in arid regions), scraps of basketry and fabrics. For a while longer, there are seeds and pollens, stones and bones. But soon enough there are only enigmatic stone flakes and tools – not much from which to intuit how a people lived, what they knew, and how they understood themselves, their gods and the world around them.
Oracle's announcement yesterday of its "Unbreakable Linux 2.0" program, aimed squarely at Red Hat, understandably overshadowed another announcement Larry Ellison made in the same speech. The fact that Oracle will provide cut-rate support for Red Hat Linux is of course big news, and if you have any doubt that Oracle thinks so, too, check out Oracle's home page today , which is entirely dedicated to its Linux news (even featuring the commanding presence of a body-armored penguin with clear steroids-abuse issues). You'll find an audio link to Oracle CEO Larry Ellison's speech there as well. And if you check out their News page, you'll see that as part of Oracle's media blitz, it issued a total of 8 press releases yesterday.
Naturally, you'll be able to find reams of news, prognostications and punditry on the Linux announcement all over the Web, so I'll focus my attention today on the press release that I find to be most interesting: the one that tracks Ellison's announcement in the same speech that Oracle has joined the Free Standards Group (FSG), at the highest level of membership. You can find that press release here. (Disclosure: FSG is a client of mine, and I'm also on its Board of Directors)
Why the FSG announcement is important has to do with why the FSG is important. You can begin to get a handle on that reality from the squib in the press release that summarizes what the FSG is all about:
The Free Standards Group is the standardization and certification authority for Linux. Without a commonly adopted standard, Linux could fragment, proving costly for ISVs to port their applications to the operating system and making it difficult for end users and Linux vendors alike. With the LSB, all parties - distribution vendors, ISVs and end users - benefit as it becomes easier and less costly for software vendors to target Linux, resulting in more applications available for the Linux platform. All major Linux commercial and community organizations support the Free Standards Group.
Stated even more simply, the FSG is an essential component in the Linux ecosystem. Without such a conscious and well-supported effort to keep Linux cohesive, it could fly apart. With the FSG, dynamism, creative evolution, multiplying distros and end-user freedom can continue to flourish.
Unicode marks the most significant advance in writing systems since the Phoenicians
James J. O'Donnell, Provost, Georgetown University
There are fundamental standards that are constantly in the news, such as XML (and its many offspring). And there are standards development organizations, like the W3C, that enjoy a high profile in part because of the importance of the technical domains that they serve. Some standards have even taken on socio-political significance, becoming pawns in international diplomacy, such as the root domains of the Internet, despite the fact that they are insignificant in size and design. .
But there are other standards that go largely unheralded, and are developed by consortia that are virtually never in the news, despite the vast social and technical significance of the standard in question. Perhaps chief among them is the Unicode, created and constantly extended by the Unicode Consortium, whose loyal and widely distributed team of contributors for the most part labor quietly in the background of information technology.
Notwithstanding the low profile of the Unicode and its creators, it is this standard that enables nearly all those living in the world today to communicate with each other in their native language character sets. It even permits the words of many of those that lived in the past to become accessible to those alive today in electronic form, and in their original character sets as well.