freedom bits

The Inquirer has an interesting opinion piece called "Microsoft twists and turns over ODF" in which they pick up on the MS-OOXML conversion hoax:

The problem is that if Robertson and Paoli’s early claim is correct would be theoretically impossible to convert a plane into a car? If Open XML is so complex it would be a bugger to convert into something as simple as ODF. Unless they have got it all wrong of course.

And link to the six questions about MS-OOXML that are meanwhile available in eight languages. If you want to add more, please check this page on how to get involved in FSFE’s translation effort. FSFE will continue to offer information on

• the MS-OOXML archival myth
• the MS-OOXML conversion hoax
• why MS-OOXML means "Microsoft only"

as deep links for the time being, because the topic is still not as widely discussed as it should be. Only yesterday did I have a journalist from a well-known news agency tell me about fearing the topic might be too "technical" for their readers. Formats and protocols are like languages. And formats for office applications concern virtually every computer user and every citizen of every government that makes use of software. So practically everyone who could read this. That ought to be a large enough potential readership to publish something.

In a democracy it is the responsibility of the media to oversee the government, analyse their work and criticise when democratic principles are being thrown overboard — which unfortunately happens all too often when there is no public scrutiny. A sad example was recently delivered by the Swiss standardisation body for e-government (eCH), which in an act of anticipatory obedience approved MS-OOXML as an Open Standard for Switzerland with a description that reads like it was written by Microsoft’s spin-doctors, including the obviously false claim of free implementability across vendors and platforms.

Microsoft certainly has huge advertising budgets, and it is known that they like to wave this fact in front of publishers to get friendlier treatment. So stories about their barely concealed manipulation of UN processes or US state governments usually have a hard time gaining traction in mainstream media.

The BBC and The Inquirer have now given some coverage to this issue, but most journalists are still unaware of the significance of what is going on. So we will need to make them aware. Help us spread the word.

Here are two things you can do easily:

1. Email the newspapers and journalists you may know and ask them to have a look at
   • the MS-OOXML archival myth
   • the MS-OOXML conversion hoax
   • why MS-OOXML means "Microsoft only"

   As well as

   • Dual Standards: More Choice, Or Less?
   • Rob Weir’s blog
   • Bob Sutor’s blog
   • ODF Alliance web page

   Because unlike MS-OOXML, the Open Document Format (ODF) has support from a large group of independent and competing vendors and implementations.

2. Put this banner on your web page and use it to link to the six questions on MS-OOXML that are still unanswered:
   
   
   

   <a href="http://fsfeurope.org/documents/msooxml-questions" border="0"><img src="http://fsfeurope.org/graphics/msooxml_small.png" /></a>

Microsoft has been quite busy signing up various associates such as Novell, Xandros, Linspire and Turbolinux to work on its MS-OOXML converter. This was somewhat surprising.

To make myself clear: It was no surprise that Microsoft would try to enroll the help of other companies to make its proprietary format seem more interoperable than it is. It also came as no surprise that some companies were interested enough in improving their cash-flow balance to agree promoting the Microsoft agenda. What came as a surprise was the unquestioning acceptance of the possibility to achieve full interoperability through a converter when Microsoft had already stated that it did not support the Open Document Format (ODF) because it wanted features that ODF did not have.

Ignoring for a moment the point that ODF does not have those features because Microsoft remained a passive observer of the Open Document Format (ODF) standardisation process — something they could change with the investment of participating in two telephone conferences — there is a striking weakness to the idea of conversion.

So I wrote a guest commentary for Heise.de, titled "The Converter Hoax" which is online now. The core sentence is probably this one:

If these converters were actually able to do what they promise to do, they would be unnecessary.

The converters ultimately establish a one-way street into vendor lock-in on MS-OOXML, so they end up helping promote lock-in and dependency instead of supporting interoperability and freedom of competition.

The BBC just put an article by FSFE media coordinator Joachim Jakobs and myself online in which we respond to an earlier article on a "time bomb" in the UK National Archives.

What Microsoft carefully sought to avoid mentioning in that article is that they themselves placed that time bomb in the UK National Archives which now threatens to cause a "digital dark hole" according to Gordon Frazer of Microsoft UK.

You can find our response online here.

While FSFE was busy holding its 2007 general assembly in Brussels, Belgium, the world kept spinning. In this case backwards, unfortunately. After the state of Massachusetts had become famous for its clear-sighted move towards Open Standards in general and the Open Document Format (ODF) in particular, recent news is that state officials now plan to go back to accepting vendor lock-in.

There are various reports on the issue, including Andy Updegrove’s blog and Groklaw, which has a cleaned up and highlighted version of the definitions of the Massachusetts’ government "Designation of Standards/Specifications as Enterprise Standards."

Since the Massachusetts state officials correctly identified MS-OOXML as a proprietary, vendor-specific format, they introduced another category on top of Open Standards: Enterprise Standards, which are being defined as either Open Standards and/or "de-facto industry standards," with a reference to this Wikipedia article that is ironically marked "This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia’s quality standards."

As pointed out during the 2006 Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Athens, "de-facto standards" means that one player has become so dominant that its proprietary format seems to be used everywhere. It boils down to a euphemism for monopoly.

Since standards are about allowing competition on the merits between different vendors, such "de-facto standards" are therefore not only no standards, they are in fact quite regularly the opposite of standards.

So what the Massachusetts government really says is that it is okay to be locked into monopolistic software and data formats, that governments should help convicted monopolists to perpetuate their stranglehold over the local population, and that freedom of competition is nothing a government should be concerned about.

That sounds quite different to what I understood the role of a government to be. It also contradicts previously declared policy, like the statements of September 2005 by Eric Kriss, Secretary of Administration & Finance for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts:

"What we’ve backed away from at this point is the use of a proprietary standard and we want standards that are published and free of legal encumbrances, and we don’t want two standards."

But maybe the current local administration is simply afraid to make the same experience that Peter Quinn had to go through in November 2005. In case you don’t remember, here is a wrap-up from CIO.com that has all the typical elements of political drama: A monopolist lobbying massively for its interests, a CIO that stands up for the interests of the public against the monopolist, and a public smear campaign for which the monopolist neither denies nor confirms its involvement that ends with the resignation of the CIO who dared to oppose their interest.

Seen in this light, the latest news appear to be the continuation of the saga with the new CIO now handing Microsoft a carte blanche for whatever proprietary format they wish to force upon the people in Massachusetts through the state government.

It sounds like this might be a case for the new Lawrence Lessig.

But we cannot hope for any single person to fix all problems for us. All of this makes it even more important to raise the public awareness for standardisation issues, because data lock-in causes software lock-in, and that lock-in has become the most severe problem for migration to Free Software.

We need public attention for these issues. Public scrutiny is the only widely available countermeasure. Without the public pressure there will be no counterweight to the industrial and financial power of the monopolist.

The most important issue in this area right now is the attempt of Microsoft to get its MS-OOXML format rubber-stamped as an ISO standard. While this is not exactly the same as an Open Standard, that difference is theoretical only, as most governments have policies of accepting ISO standards.

So please take a look at the Six questions to national standardisation bodies and help us spread the word

which you can do by inserting this HTML code into your web page:

<a href="http://fsfeurope.org/documents/msooxml-questions" border="0"><img src="http://fsfeurope.org/graphics/msooxml_small.png" /></a>