For a sequel to this blog entry, see: A Tale of Two Press Releases: Big Lies and Objective Journalism

This blog entry is a rarity for me: an exegesis on the deliberate disinformation spread by a single vendor.  I generally avoid a piece like this for two reasons: first, every vendor has its own PR agenda, with the differences being a matter of degree between the egregious and the merely disingenuous.  More importantly, there is a risk when focusing on a single vendor of decreasing one's reputation for objectivity, despite the fact that one may certainly focus on the statements of a single source and fairly find them to be both inaccurate and cynical. 

What persuaded me to take up the cudgels in this case was a quote I read earlier this week in eWeek, and then spotted again  Bob Sutor's blog today:

"You can achieve interoperability in a number of ways," said [Microsoft's] Robertson. Among them: joint collaboration agreements, technology licensing and interoperability pacts.

The reason this statement caught my eye was that Scott Edwards (also of Microsoft) had used virtually the exact same words at a NIST workshop that I spoke at a month or so ago, offering such methods as valid alternatives to "open standards."  My reaction then, as now, is that such means can in no way represent equivalent alternatives to open standards, although they might offer an avenue to a single vendor, or to a cadre of vendors, to control a marketplace to their own advantage.  When you hear something once, it can be off-hand remark, but when you hear it twice, it's clear that it's a corporate talking point.  And when it comes from the General Manager for Standards of a dominant vendor, it becomes worrisome.

Still and all, and to be fair, Roberson's statement is accurate in a technical sense, although when used in certain contexts (such as the NIST workshop) it can be misleading to an audience that isn't knowledgeable about standards. 

Earlier this week, the Massachusetts Information Technology Division (ITD) issued a Request for Information (RFI) titled "OpenDocument Format Plug-in for Microsoft Office Suite."   Almost immediately, Pamela Jones posted word at Groklaw  from Gary Edwards that the OpenDocument Foundation had completed just such a plug-in, and would be responding in detail to the ITD shortly.  There will surely be other responses as well, as I have received email over the past several month from other groups embarked on the same project, some as far afield as Australia.

The RFI itself has some interesting aspects as well.  Rather than a formal  Request for Proposals, the RFI is instead a message to the greater IT community asking for assistance, not only from those that may be creating tools, but from those that may simply be aware of something interesting that is going on.  Specifically, what the ITD is looking for are tools that can assist it in its conversion to software that supports the ODF-compliant office software.  The page at the ITD procurement Website where you can view the RFI in ODF, PDF or (yes) Word format is here. 

As a result, if you are involved in a relevant project, or know of one, I would encourage you to check out the RFI and supply any information that you may have that could be useful.  Whether or not you have anything to offer, though, the RFI makes for interesting reading, and I'll now point out a few reasons why.

One of the great goals of standards development is to encourage the proliferation of multiple products that are comparable and interoperable at the level of standardization, but which each compete with value-added features, level of service and otherwise.  This arises from a set of mutual expectations among vendors and end-users that each will benefit from the wide uptake of the standard, especially where interoperability is a necessity, or lock-in a danger. 

To the vendor, the anticipated benefit is the rapid development of a larger and more long-term market than would result from multiple proprietary offerings, while the value to the end-user is greater choice, lower prices, more useful features, and avoidance of lock-in.  But none of this will occur to the benefit of any stakeholder unless multiple vendors decide to implement the standard in question.  As a result, the OpenDocument Format (ODF) will only be as valuable to end-users in fact as it is perceived to be potentially valuable to developers. 

Happily, multiple developers, both proprietary vendors as well as open source communities, have decided that there is great value to be gained from supporting the ODF standard, promising just such an environment of rich features, service and protection from lock-in.  Some have achieved a great deal of press, most notably Sun's StarOffice 8.0, the open-source OpenOffice 2.0 suite, developed by OpenOffice.org (which is supported by Sun) and IBM's Workplace Managed Client.   

But there are also versions of ODF that are not fueled by vendor funding, and the most fully developed of those offerings is KOffice, an open-source office suite developed by the KDE (K Development Environment) project, which has been hard at work developing a free, open desktop environment and development platform since 1996 that runs on many UNIX variants, including Linux.  A few weeks ago, KDE announced the release of KOffice 1.5, which achieves a high degree of support for ODF.

In this extensive interview, I explore with Inge Wallin, the KOffice Promotions Lead, how KOffice is different from the other major office productivity releases that support ODF, which users may find it most appropriate to their needs, in what directions future development will proceed, and much more.  In the future, I hope to provide similar interviews with representatives of the other major offerings, in order to illustrate the way in which the ODF standards-based office productivity environment is evolving in real time. 

The six month voting window for ISO/IEC adoption of the OASIS OpenDocument Format (ODF) standard closed on May 1, and at midnight (Geneva time) last night it was announced internally that ODF had been approved by the ISO members eligible and interested in casting a vote.  The vote passed with broad participation and no negative votes (there were a few abstentions), and ODF is now ISO/IEC 26300.  While there are still some procedural steps internal to ISO/IEC that are required before the official text of the standard will be finalized and issued, these steps (described below) are formalities rather than gating factors.

With adoption of ODF by ISO/IEC now assured, software that implements the standard will now become more attractive to those European and other government purchasers for whom global adoption by ISO/IEC is either desirable, or required.  Given the ongoing unhappiness in Europe with Microsoft over what the EU regards as unacceptable bundling and other practices, this may be particularly significant, especially when taken with the desire of many European and other purchasers to use open source products whenever possible.  Offerings such as OpenOffice and KOffice therefore should receive a boost in appeal and usage, as well as for-sale versions, such as Sun's StarOffice and IBM's Internet-based offering.

Microsoft's Open XML specification, also headed for consideration by ISO/IEC, is still in process within Ecma.  Upon completion, it would be submitted to the same voting process. 

Like many that have followed the OpenDocument Format (ODF) story in Massachusetts, I've wondered what former State CIO Peter Quinn would eventually decide to do after announcing his resignation late last year.  Since then, he's engaged in a whirlwind public speaking tour that has taken him throughout Europe and as far away as Australia.  While doing so, he's told the story of what befell him in Massachusetts, and promoted open standards and open source software.

While catching up on my Google Alerts just now, I finally stumbled on the answer in the closing paragraphs of a long article at InformationWeek.com.  That article was called Lightning Rod no Longer, and focused on corporate ethics, using Peter as an example of someone who didn't take favors from vendors, but got pilloried anyway.  In it, Peter describes in detail how increasing attention (welcome and otherwise) focused on Massachusetts, and how he became in increasing demand as a speaker on the importance of open standards and open source software in government.  As a result, his speaking invitations became more numerous, eventually providing a spurious opening for his integrity to be questioned. 

According to this article, Peter is returning to the private sector, not surprisingly having had enough of government service, at least for now.

As you may recall, a new organization called the ODF Alliance was formed on March 3 of this year to support the uptake of the OpenDocument Format (ODF) by governments.  It's formation was in large part intended to make the adoption of ODF less difficult for future states (and less dangerous for state CIOs) than it had been for Massachusetts last year. Yesterday, the ODF Alliance  issued a press release announcing that it has more than tripled its membership to 138, and has also appointed a Managing Director.

As I reported one month ago today when I decided to look in on the Alliance a few weeks after its launch, this highly targeted initiative got off to a very rapid start.  It appears that the pace of recruitment has slowed (membership leaped from 38 to 113 in the first two and a half weeks, while an additional 25 members have joined in the past month), but I expect that the rate of recruitment may pick up again with the addtion of the new Managing Director, Marino Marcich.

Late last week, Louis Gutierrez gave his first interview since becoming Massachusetts State CIO.  The lengthy list of questions was posed by Computerworld's Carol Sliwa, and represents the first status report on the implementation of OpenDocument Format (ODF) since the resignation of Peter Quinn at the end of last year.  In the interview, Gutierrez expands on the themes that he introduced in his first public presentation, given on March 15 at a meeting of the Massachusetts Government Information Systems Association (MGISA) at which I moderated and also presented.  Those themes include patience, deliberation, a refusal to engage in turf battles, a focus on getting the job done, and a refreshing inclination for straight talk.

It may be no surprise that the new CIO would bring a careful and non-confrontational style to the current challenge.  He was, after all, the first CIO of the state's Information Technology Division (ITD), and returns to that post from another state appointment - as CIO of the executive office of Health and Human Services, where he implemented significant IT initiatives.  Unlike his predecessor, he therefore brings a preexisting and extensive knowledge of how things are done (and best not done) on Beacon Hill.  He's not looking to fight any battles other than those that must be fought, and has no intention of butting heads to no purpose.

It is perhaps no surprise that Minnesota, a blue state like Massachusetts and heir to the political traditions of the Prairie Populists, should be the situs of a bill to require "open data formats."    In spirit, this is a good thing, as it indicates a broadening appeal for open document format standards that, if missing, would be worrisome. But is the bill as submitted an encouraging signal that a bandwagon effect is taking hold, or a step towards standards Babel, and a leap backwards? The question is a serious one for a variety of reasons, and cuts to the heart of why standards exist.

Clearly, the definition of an "open standard" contained in the Minnesota bill includes many of the attributes that make a standard useful, such as requirements intended to prevent "lock-in" by a single proprietary vendor. But inherent in the concept of a standard is wide acceptance - and if everyone comes up with their own definition of what an "open standard" means, then there is no "standard" for what a "standard" is. If that happens, then the whole economic basis for standardization collapses, because the incentive for a vendor to support a standard is to reach and sell to a large potential customer base with a single, uniform product. Unless each customer specifies the same standards requirements, then the vendor can expect no return on its investment. Moreover, the citizenry suffers as well, because the software that someone needs to exchange a document with her state congressman in St. Paul may not be what's required to communicate with her senator in Washington.

On January 25 of this year, I wrote a blog entry called The State of Play on ODF in Massachusetts: Milestones, Due Dates and Status. In that entry, I identified six milestones to watch for to determine whether adoption of OpenDocument Format (ODF) was on track in Massachusetts. Since then there has been progress in each of these areas, meaning that it's about time for an update. At the same time, new milestones to watch for have emerged, which I will identify at the end of this entry.

So here we go, with the indented portions below comprising excerpts from the earlier blog entry.

1. Morrissey Amendment: On November 2, 2005, word reached the public that amendment an to an economic stimulus bill had been introduced by Senator Michael Morrissey in the Massachusetts Senate that would radically shift policy making power away from the ITD to a political task force. The text of that amendment was later modified somewhat, but the bill was not enacted into law before the legislature adjourned for the holidays….

I received an email yesterday pointing me to a bill, introduced on March 27, that would require all Executive branch agencies in the state of Minnesota to "use open standards in situations where the other requirements of a project do not make it technically impossible to do this."  The text of the bill is focused specifically on "open data formats," and would amend the existing statute that establishes the authority of the Office of Enterprise Technology (OET), and the duties of the states Chief Information Officer.  While the amendment does not refer to open source software, the definition of "open standards" that it contains would be conducive to open source implementations of open standards. The text of the affected sections of Minnesota Statutes Chapter 16E, showing the amendments proposed, can be found here.

The fact that such a bill has been introduced is significant in a number of respects.  First, the debate over open formats will now be ongoing in two U.S. states rather than one.  Second, if the bill is successful, the Minnesota CIO will be required to enforce a law requiring the use of open formats, rather than be forced to justify his or her authority to do so.  Third, the size of the market share that can be won (or lost) depending upon a vendor's compliance with open standards will increase.  And finally, if two states successfully adopt and implement open data format policies, other states will be more inclined to follow.