OOXML Yes vote questions and complaints

Posted by ciaran on 0

IFSO member Ben North has sent a Freedom of Information Act request regarding Ireland’s change to a Yes vote to the National Standards Authority of Ireland. The request has been received and we’re told it’s being acted on. Letters sent by IFSO during the ISO consultation can be found on IFSO’s correspondence page.

Becta in the UK have sent a complaint to the EU about the UK’s Yes vote. This story was also covered on channelregister.co.uk.

And now I see that "the city of Aarhus" in Denmark have registered a complaint about Denmark’s Yes vote. (From Groklaw’s newspicks)

All is not over yet and OOXML may come out of this with a very negative image. Background info can be found on FSFE’s open standards page.

UPDATE May 27th: South Africa has complained to ISO.

UPDATE May 30th: Brazil is now complaining too.

— 
Ciarán O’Riordan,
Support free software: Join FSFE’s Fellowship

Working breakfast on Community Patent

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Here’s a report from a breakfast meeting I was at yesterday on the topic of SMEs and the Community Patent. There were 50 seats, all full. The speakers included representatives from the Commission, the Parliament, and the Slovenian EU Presidency.

The most interesting part was the speech by a Director of the European Commission. She talked about its possible adoption, the motivations, translations, and she responded to my question about software patents. (Each topic has a section title if you want to skip some parts.)

Possible adoption

About the possible adoption of this proposal, she talked about this being one final attempt. The question of how realistic this proposal is is an important one since the EC have been making proposals on this since 1962 without success. She said that only one country is still openly opposed to the current proposal: Spain. France is not supporting the proposal, but that’s only because they’re not willing to start an open conflict with Spain. So if Spain can be convinced to change their position, then agreement could be possible quite soon. Me, I hope Spain continues to block this until all the problems are fixed.

Motivations

On motivations, she gave an example of an unnamed large European tyre manufacturer. I’ll paraphrase slightly. This manufacturer applied for patents in it’s core markets which were the UK, Italy, France, and Germany. Then they heard that a shipment of tyres was to arrive in Antwerp and that those tyres used the patented idea. The European tyre manufacturer phoned the Belgian authorities and asked them to stop the shipment in Antwerp, but the Belgian authorities refused. The allegedly infringed patent didn’t exist in Belgium. It only existed in the UK, Italy, France, and Germany. The arrival of the tyres in Belgium might not be a big problem (given that Belgium isn’t a core market for them), but because the EU has reduced borders, these tyres could easily be transported into the UK, Italy, France, or Germany.

I don’t have a position on the patentability of tyres, but this example is interesting because it’s quite easy to understand. When we’re making proposals for how to avoid harming software developers, we have to keep in mind what the possible legitimate goals of the legislation are. That allows us to make proposals that face less resistance.

Another interesting point is that when telling the tyre story, she kept referring to this as "counterfeiting". I’m not sure if that was just an accidental wrong choice of word or if this is a hint at a plan to link the ideas of patent infringement and counterfeiting, or even a plan to broaden the definition of "counterfeiting".

Translations

On translations, she said most countries were now satisfied with the proposal to have patents only in English, French, and German. Unofficial automated translations would be provided in the other languages of the EU. She acknowledge the general low quality of automated translations but said that the EPO had now developed some amazing new software for automated translations.

This made me think of a comment about ODF and OOXML compatibility: To sway votes, it doesn’t have to be technically possible, it just has to be politically possible. Heh.

Software patents question

At question time, I asked: When I talk to SMEs in the field of software, they say they want fewer or no software patents. We have to remember that every patent is a regulation. Every patent is bureaucracy. The software patents that exist today, although dubiously legal, are making product development difficult. They are particularly problematic when they block the use of a standard, thus prevent others from writing useful software. Wouldn’t a faster, cheaper system worsen the current problem in those fields?

Of the six questions asked, the moderator picked this question out as the most interesting. He was an MEP, so it was nice to see this issue still touches a nerve – even moreso because he was a pro-swpat MEP (or was in 2005 at least).

The Commission speaker’s reply was that the Community Patent doesn’t aim to encourage more patents, weaker patents, or an increase of wrongly-granted patents – but she didn’t explain how it wouldn’t. She did say that being EU-wide, it would be easier to overturn wrongly-granted patents since they would only have to be overturned once instead of in every Member State. She also said that by making the granting process faster, the period of uncertainty would be reduced.

Those two points are not wrong, but they’re help is not so great, and they definitely wouldn’t cancel out the problems caused by the increased number of patents (which is inevitable if the process is faster, cheaper).

When talking about software patents, she constantly called them "wrongly granted" patents or "disguised software patents". This is consistent with the European Commission’s position that software patents are not valid, but "computer implemented inventions" are valid. In reality, the latter is just a vague term which includes software patents. The European Commission’s use of these funny terms and definitions makes meaningful dialogue difficult.

Asking a question won’t have an immediate effect. Commission and Parliament speakers are ready for these questions. The point is that they have to be reminded constantly that we’re still here, the problem is still here, and we still want a solution. If you’re at such a meeting and no one else raises the issue of software patents or free software, you have to ask a question. It’s also good practice. Asking questions is the best way to get good at asking good questions 🙂

Miscellaneous

Aside from the above points, she mentioned in passing that the London Protocol had made progress and that France had now ratified it, and said that she hoped this would encourage others to also ratify it.

She also positioned the Community Patent as something that is meant to help the little guy. She went as far to say that Big Business is trying to stall the Community Patent behind the scenes – saying that Big Business doesn’t want SMEs to have access to the patent system. She said the European Commission isn’t changing the Community Patent in ways Big Business is asking for – "Big Business can take care of itself". This sort of talk is to be expected, given that it was an SME breakfast, but I thought it was interesting to note that this is how they’re promoting it.

There was no mention of the issue of having a central court, and how impartial the judges would be, and how to avoid the EPO (the executive power) having power over the court (the judicial power). Maintaining this separation of powers is important.

Well, without getting too long, that’s the summary of my notes. Probably the best way to ask questions would be to raise them on FSFE’s discussion mailing list. And there’s more information about software patents FSFE’s Software Patents page.

In related news, FFII published a very interesting press release on another software patents topic yesterday: "McCreevy wants to legalise Software Patents via a US-EU patent treaty".

— 
Ciarán O’Riordan,
Support free software: Join FSFE’s Fellowship

Links: swpats, OLPC, MS+Blender

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See also: Yesterday’s links – the archive of my Links posts.

— 
Ciarán O’Riordan,
Support free software: Join FSFE’s Fellowship

Wikipedia’s free software articles as of April 2008

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After the free software movement, Wikipedia has to be my favourite computer-enabled community project. It does a first rate job of getting computer users involved, it’s articles can be freely copied and modified, and it has lots of useful info.

Since I blogged about it last year, English Wikipedia’s Free Software Portal has continued to improve. The "Topics" and "Featured and Good content" boxes on the portal are interesting, as is the separate archive of highlighted articles. There are now also Free Software Portals on 15 of the Wikipedia’s in other languages (compared to 6 in March 2007). For the list, see the box at the bottom of the left-hand column of the Portal.

As well as the articles having good info, the references sections at the bottom of each article are very useful. I often dig around the references when I’m looking for an old webpage or news article whose title I can’t remember.

Here is a list of some good free software articles. They’re good, but remember that you can improve them.

Of course, there are also plenty of articles that really should be better, such as:

And interesting related articles:

And there are hundreds of articles on specific free software packages: glibc, GCC, Emacs, OpenOffice.org, RockBox, etc.

The coordination WikiProject for Free Software is still there, but isn’t used for much.

— 
Ciarán O’Riordan,
Support free software: Join FSFE’s Fellowship

Links: Net filtering, gNewSense, OLPC, Guile

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See also: Yesterday’s links – the archive of my Links posts.

— 
Ciarán O’Riordan,
Support free software: Join FSFE’s Fellowship

The Open Parliament petition

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A few weeks ago, FSFE co-launched the Open Parliament petition, along with Esoma and OpenForum Europe. Here’s a summary of why we’re asking you to sign it, and we hope you’ll point others to it.

The focus of this petition is to ask the European Parliament to review their policies for choosing software and for publishing data. We’d like the elected politicians to be able to choose free software and we’d like data to be published in open standards.

The online petition is not part of the official petitions process inside the European Parliament, but it is a way to show that this issue is important. On the openparliament.eu website you can see the text of the petition.

This text was written for the official internal petitions procedure of the European Parliament. It avoids technical details and it focusses on referencing related projects instead of making detailed requests. As far as I know, this is the normal style for petitions. Some studies will be done to define the details. FSFE is explicitly mentioned in the petition, so we will be involved in the process to ensure it does it’s job of removing barriers to the use of free software.

The open standards aspects are important because when the European Parliment publishes videos in proprietary formats, they are pressuring EU citizens to use proprietary software.

In March, we made a joint press release and held a press conference in the European Parliament with MEPs David Hammerstein and Eva Lichtenberger. (Old friends from the anti-swpat campaign.)

— 
Ciarán O’Riordan,
Support free software: Join FSFE’s Fellowship

Open standards section on fsfeurope.org

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There’s now an open standards project section on the fsfeurope.org website. There are links to our previous documents, including the ones about ISO and OOXML. Maybe most interesting is that there’s a definition of open standards that we endorse. We didn’t write this definition, but we took part in it’s drafting, and many of our projects need to define "open standard" at some point, so this is the common definition we’re using. Comments welcome, obviously.

There’s also a new website section for hosting the leaflets that we have at our conference booths. Comments welcome there too (that is, unless you’re going to say the formatting of the software patents leaflet is horrible – I just spotted that myself).

— 
Ciarán O’Riordan,
Support free software: Join FSFE’s Fellowship

RMS interview, GPLv3 adoption, GPL logos

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Datamation’s James Maguire just published an article with an audience questions session and an interview of Richard Stallman. I think it’s quite interesting. There’s also a page 2 and a page 3.

On that kind of topic, Palamida‘s GPLv3 blog reports the number of GPLv3 projects has reached 2,000. I’ll have to look into this however since a friend said his company’s three GPLv3’d projects aren’t listed, so the reported number may be a conservative estimate. I just also noticed that the Boycott Novell site has some cautionary advice for Palamida about how to describe licence risk.

And while I’m blogging, here’s a link to new logos for projects using GPLv3 …and while grabbing that link, I just noticed that FSF has launched a jobs directory.

— 
Ciarán O’Riordan,
Support free software: Join FSFE’s Fellowship

What to do with ISO and OOXML?

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So, FSFE is concerned about the ISO process, but the ISO process is not over, and the ISO process is not the only process. First, ISO endorsement does not automatically lead to endorsement by national governments. Second, there are still two months during which the ISO votes can be contested – and there are already a lot of allegations of voting irregularities.

The national level

Sometime in the future, separate to the ISO vote, each country will make its own decision to accept/reject the ODF and OOXML standards. Many countries have already accepted ODF.

Voting irregularities

OOXML needed 22 votes out of 32 to be approved. It got 24 because a lot of countries changed their vote in the last few days. Now there are numerous complaints about those votes. If 3 of those "approve" were changed back to "disapprove" in the next two months, then OOXML would be denied ISO certification.

UPDATE: Computerworld is carrying an article saying that the European Commission started investigating Microsoft’s participation in February, and this story is also on CNet.

Noooxml.org also have a page of irregularities, and more stories will surely appear on Groklaw.

Related press releases

And, for what it’s worth, here’s a list of some press releases from organisations who were also against OOXML.

— 
Ciarán O’Riordan,
Support free software: Join FSFE’s Fellowship

What’s wrong with OOXML anyway?

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ISO has now approved OOXML. In FSFE, as our press release title says, that makes us concerned about quality of standardisation process; but if you’re like most of the world and haven’t followed every OOXML blog entry from Andy Updegrove, noooxml.org and Groklaw, you may be wondering: what’s wrong with OOXML anyway?

I’ll try to summarise points from those blogs and FSFE’s previous writings on the issue. Because this news is unfolding fast, I’ll put this blog entry online section by section as I write it.

Patents

When people pointed out the danger of Microsoft’s patents, Microsoft published an "Open Specification Promise" saying that they won’t use their products against your project "to the extent it conforms to" the OOXML specification. However, Microsoft’s own word processor does not fully comply with the OOXML specification, so if you try to make software compatible with their word processor, they can still use their patents against you. (This was pointed out FSF Latin America)

Further problems with their promise have been detailed in SFLC’s document No Assurance for GPL.

Technical

wreck
Archive your data here?

It is known that the OOXML specification contains hundreds of problems. The Grokdoc website lists many, and the national standards bodies submitted more than 1,100 in September 2007. When these were discussed in Geneva at the end of February, it was concluded that there was nowhere near enough time to discuss all the problems. A bulk vote was proposed on the Thursday and on Friday a 6:4 vote approved, without discussion, Microsoft’s suggestons for 900 problems.

ISO not up to the task

It seems ISO was not up to the task of making a technical decision under pressure, and failed to fix their process when the cracks became obvious. ODF remains the only open standard. There are claims of voting irregularities in United Kingdom, Germany+Croatia, Norway, Poland and others.