Oliver Bell’s weblog

Those who were present for the second half of the event that the University Of New South Wales CyberLaw centre organized late last year to look at OpenXML technical and legal questions will remember Steve Mutkoski’s presentation comparing the language in the Open Specification Promise with the OpenDocument Patent Statement from Sun Microsystems,  Interoperability Specification Pledge issued by IBM.

As a complement to that conversation Baker & McKenzie have posted a paper entitled “Standardisation and Licensing of Microsoft’s Office Open XML File Formats“;

This paper was commissioned by Microsoft and  seeks to address and clarify any misunderstandings in the industry, and among the wider general public, about both the standardisation process that Microsoft has embarked upon in respect of its Office Open XML Reference Schema, as well as the legal arrangements governing the use of the Schema by others.

From the document;

The following discussion examines both the CNS and OSP and compares them to similar instruments issued by Sun and IBM in connection with document format standards. What the comparison demonstrates is that all four instruments adopt broadly similar approaches to address certain common issues.The full text of all of these instruments is annexed to this note.

As I have mentioned before, this type of licensing is extremely important to the industry as a whole, providing a mechanism for any developer to be able to implement a specification without having to deal with original patent or rights holders.

You can download the paper from here.

According to Wikipedia the term FUD was first defined by Gene Amdahl after he left IBM to found his own company, Amdahl Corp.: “FUD is the fear, uncertainty, and doubt that IBM sales people instil in the minds of potential customers who might be considering Amdahl products.”

As Eric S. Raymond writes: “The idea, of course, was to persuade buyers to go with safe IBM gear rather than with competitors’ equipment. This implicit coercion was traditionally accomplished by promising that Good Things would happen to people who stuck with IBM, but Dark Shadows loomed over the future of competitors’ equipment or software. After 1991 the term has become generalized to refer to any kind of disinformation used as a competitive weapon.”

The FUD machine has been hard at work for IBM throughout this whole process,  despite loud and frequent protests that this isn’t the case.

My colleagues at Microsoft have asserted all along that much of this debate is principally driven by a competitive position between a small number of vendors, something that has again been denied by IBM.

As usual though reality does not match the words.

As an example, one by one discussions with national standards bodies here in the Asia Pacific region have been quietly moved by mysterious third party lobbying from a positive collaborative effort into a beauty competition or face-off, generally with Microsoft and our partners on one side of the table and IBM and a small collection of their allies on the other, sometimes the allies change but the pre-agreed talking points rarely do.

Events have played out in the media and in the blogosphere over the last couple of weeks that represent a breakdown of some of those anti-OpenXML arguments that have been played back so frequently over the last year.

Arguments that there is a lack of demand for Open XML, the specification is too complex to implement, the specification can’t be deployed cross platform and the long running but baseless claim that the Ecma-376 specification might be encumbered by IPR and patent threats all appear to have been cast aside as big blue steps up to meet the demands of their own customers and the market in general.

Here is a blow by blow review of the relevant activity over the last two weeks…

Thursday, 17th Jan: Brian Jones posted a blog entry talking a little about the support that Google is adding to their search products to render OpenXML documents to HTML for simplified viewing. One of the comments on that post added some facts around IBMs own support for OpenXML in some of their products, something that we had not gone looking for, nor did we expect to find given IBMs fierce anti-OpenXML stance.

Friday 18th Jan: Several of my colleagues found this point interesting enough to blog about… so Doug Mahugh, Stephen McGibbon,  Gray Knowlton and myself all went ahead and did so.  Stephen (who, like myself, heralds from the north of England and wields a great northern English sense of humour) hypothesised in his post that we might be about to see an announcement from IBM at Lotusphere in relation to their growing support for the OpenXML file format.

Sunday 20th Jan: In an article titled “Whoops! IBM products support Microsoft’s Open XML doc format” Computerworld’s Eric Lai picked up the story, to quote his article;

Nobody has invested more in defeating Microsoft Corp.’s Office Open XML document format than IBM.

So why is IBM supporting Open XML in a handful of its products?

According to technical documentation on IBM’s own Web sites, the company already supports Open XML, the native file format of Microsoft Office 2007, in at least four of its programs.

Monday 21st Jan: This is where the wheels start to come off the IBM strategy a little. Rob Weir, one of IBMs standards experts and their Chief of creating anti-OpenXML news, went out of his way to post a lengthy protestabout what he had read on the “Microsoft Blogger echo chamber”, he argued that although IBM clearly supports OpenXML in a number of their products that they actually don’t. A confusing position at best.

Wednesday 23rd Jan: In yet another confusing post Bob Sutor, a senior vice president of IBM, posted an article on his personal blog entitled “While you’re waiting, don’t save in OOXML format“, the premise of his article was that the ballot resolution meeting in Geneva may change the specification of OpenXML so whatever you do don’t save any documents in the current format, if you do the sky might fall.

If we apply Bob’s argument to the Open Document Format (ODF), or any other document format for that matter, then it just isn’t safe for us to save documents and probably never was. ODF 1.0 is the version that the world knows as ISO26300, it is ODF 1.1 and 1.2 where there have been some significant advances in the file format specification (adding many accessibility features, working hard on adding spreadsheet formula support, etc) so I guess that they probably shouldn’t be used either due to the fact that one day they will be deprecated, according to the argument.

Of course this makes no sense, technology and standards evolve, they always have and always will. It is safe to use ODF today, it is safe to save in legacy binary formats today and of course it is safe to use OpenXML as your document format of choice.

Thursday 24th Jan: It seems that Stephen’s comment around an announcement at Lotusphere about IBM’s growing support for OpenXML was less to do with humour and more of a prophecy.

This morning Stephen blogged about an announcement that has indeed filtered out during Lotusphere confirming that IBM will support OpenXML in their Lotus Collaboration and various Portal products. Martin LaMonica was the source of this story, an entry in his blog titled “IBM to take Lotus Symphony apps ‘Beyond Office’“.

LaMonica quotes Doug Heintzman, director of strategy for IBM collaboration technologies;

“We strongly believe that an enormous amount of innovative potential has been held back by the network effects around the file formats and the proprietary control that Microsoft has had around those formats,” he said.

IBM favors ODF as a file format because it is “truly open” and technically elegant, Heintzman said.

But IBM will support Open XML, which is the current document format in Office 2007, in its Lotus collaboration and portal products. IBM already supports older versions of Office.

It is hard to know exactly how to interpret that… it appears on the face of it that Heintzman approves of the steps that Microsoft is taking to open up what have traditionally been proprietry document formats, and it is great to see confirmation that OpenXML will indeed be supported by the Lotus Collaboration and Portal products.

I need ask Stephen to suggest some lottery numbers for me…

The ODF Alliance published a report on 20th December last year that puzzled me a little. The document talked about the steps that governments globally are taking in the debate around XML based document formats, and specifically tried to outline a number of geographies where a governments had made a selection of one standard over another.

This is a debate that I have been intimately involved with over the last couple of years, and reading through the report it struck me that the data didn’t match my own experience of what was taking place in several of the countries represented in the document, presenting a slightly more one sided view than I would have expected.

When I talk to ISVs and our customers I get a picture that aligns far more closely to an interview published in Redmond Developer News today with Alexander Falk, the CEO of Altova.

One of the questions in the article does a good job of characterizing the conversations that I have been having in the commercial and public sectors recently;

Redmond Developer News: You mentioned in our previous talk that Altova has had plenty of inquiries about OOXML support, but none at all for ODF. Does that remain the case today? What kind of interest in ODF are you seeing from your customers and the broader industry?

Alexander Falk: That is still largely the case. In terms of actual customer inquiries regarding need for ODF, we have not seen any interest from our customers. What we did start to see — although very rarely — are questions from customers who are already using our OOXML features and have read articles about OOXML vs. ODF in the press and want to know if we also plan to add ODF support. But I would categorize those few questions as more out of interest rather than out of need or actual plans to implement, from what I can see.

Looking at the list of current policy positions at the bottom of this post and aligning them with recent experience, I think the following three points are worth some ongoing consideration;

1.Technology and Standards will continue to evolve, is is vitally important for any government defining policy in this area that all options are open for exploiting any new innovations as they become available to the market.

2. Achieving interoperability is rarely as straight forward as selecting a single technical standard, and many of the policy positions around the world recognize this. Applications need to be designed to work together, groups need a solid framework for collaboration and the standards need to be ready to support these two objectives.

3. There are plenty of examples from history where the selection of a single standard has not worked out well for organizations. I have some personal experience of this having spent a few years during the 1990s assisting with the deployment of several agency wide x.400 email systems.

Nicos Tsilas and I did a little further research into some of the claims made by the ODF Alliance in this document, from what we could find the majority of countries do seem to be supporting multiple standards.

I’m not sure that the ODF Alliance have mischaracterized anything in their report, but they do seem to only be telling half of the story in most cases.

Below is a round up relating to many of the countries listed in the 20th December report, you’ll find more information in a recently published fact sheet over on openxmlcommunity.org;

Switzerland: Standards group includes Open XML and ODF in policy

Switzerland has adopted updated technical guidelines for the implementation of e-government applications and recommends using both ODF and Open XML. The two standards were approved by Switzerland’s eCH expert committee following a public hearing on June 22, 2007.

Denmark: Broad-ranging national agreement embraces both Open XML and ODF

In September 2007, the Danish Government, Local Government Denmark, and Danish Regions concluded an agreement on the use of mandatory open standards for software in the public sector. Under the agreement, all public authorities, starting on January 1, 2008, are to use seven sets of open standards for new IT solutions, including Open XML and ODF for document formats.

Malaysia: Refuses to mandate a document format standard

According to reports, Datuk Dr. Mohamad Ariffin Aton, Chief Executive of the Malaysian standards body, Sirim, said there is no chance of ODF or Open XML being made a mandatory standard in Malaysia, for two reasons. First, a standard can only be mandatory when public health or safety is at stake, which is clearly not the case here, he said. Second, a mandatory standard would constitute an illicit non-tariff barrier against software products using other document formats. Ariffin said this would violate Malaysia’s commitments to free trade under the World Trade Organization. He added, “Ultimately, it is up to the general public and users in both the public and private sectors to decide which format they want to use.”

Sweden: Official inquiry considers but rejects ODF preference

An officially sponsored inquiry into standardization in the IT field resulted in this report which considered but rejected an ODF preference.

Poland: Requires neutrality and prohibiting preferences in technical procurement decisions

The National Computerization Program (“NCP”) for 2007-2010, which is a regulation implementing Poland’s IT Act, establishes technological neutrality as a central requirement. The NCP establishes this key priority to ensure equal treatment of different IT solutions in public administration systems, and to avoid preferences and discrimination among any of them.

Japan: Urges consideration of multiple standards in procurement decisions

Japan issued new procurement Guidelines for IT in July 2007, establishing compliance with “open international standards” as one criterion among others to be considered in awarding government contracts. In a public statement, the government agency in charge of drafting the new rules stated that the Guidelines did not specify one standard over another and that there was no intent in formulating the Guidelines to rule out procurement of Microsoft products.  Separately, the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry (“METI”) circulated a draft “framework for interoperability” that lists ODF as an example of an “open international standard,” but the document was not adopted as government policy.  Moreover, the framework specifically urged the consideration of “multiple standards” in reaching procurement decisions.

Italy: Repeatedly rejects preferences in open document formats

Various regional governments in Italy have been looking at open formats generally. None of those bills has gained much support, however. At a central level, there has also been some discussion of the adoption of ODF, but no formal action has been taken. Several organizations in Italy have considered ODF preferences, but decided against them. The National Trade Association recently made a public statement on format neutrality.

Korea: Makes ODF optional

While Korea approved ODF as a national standard, the ODF Alliance has acknowledged that Korea has refrained from making its use by government agencies compulsory.

The Netherlands: Multiple document formats can coexist

In November 2007, the Netherlands announced an inclusive approach to open standards, under which ODF will be used alongside “other document formats already in use.” Specifically, the central government must be able to read, write, and exchange documents in the ODF format by April 2008. However, ODF use is not exclusive, and the government will create a series of lists of recognized standards using a definition that should sweep in competing formats, including Open XML, culminating in the complete list by mid-2008.

Russia: Supports “widely used standards”

Russia has not implemented a national document format, but instead has taken steps to mandate use of software that supports “widely used standards.” Russia’s broad language provides the freedom to allow competing standards to thrive. In this spirit, Russia voted Yes for ISO/IEC DIS 29500 (Ecma Office Open XML) and has also agreed to include ODF as part of an updated National Standardization Program.

Norway: Chooses an open-minded preference for open standards

The Norwegian government has decided to promote the use of open standards in the public sector through a gradual, phased-in implementation and expansion of an “Open Standards List.” While Open XML is not yet included in Norway’s list of approved standards, the government did not mandate the exclusive use of ODF and remains open to evaluating and including other standards. Microsoft is working with the Norwegian government and expects Open XML to join the list of permissible standards by January 1, 2009 (the date when the mandate for use of open standards takes effect).

Belgium: Enacts a transition to interoperability

In Belgium, the government approved use of ODF in July 2006. Since then, the government has been using plug-ins to enable Microsoft Office to read and save files in ODF — an even-handed approach that acknowledges that different formats can coexist and interoperate to meet different needs. Contrary to the suggestions of the ODF Alliance and others, the Belgian government’s decision on ODF is not preferential or exclusive, and Open XML, once standardized by ISO, will be considered as a new open standard and added to Belgium’s list.

France: ODF Alliance mischaracterizes government as favoring ODF

Although the ODF Alliance has claimed that France has established a preference for ODF, this is not true and is just the latest example of this group and other ODF enthusiasts playing fast and loose with the facts. The reality is that, while there is indeed a debate about mandating ODF inside the French e-Government interoperability framework task force, local and state governments and their national professional organizations are deeply hostile to such a policy given its likely negative impact on their total cost of ownership for software purchases. This is why the last meeting of the e-Government interoperability framework committee (10/12/07) ended with a lack of consensus. The next meeting is not expected to take place until the spring of 2008.

Croatia: Is open to Multiple Standards

As part of its eCroatia program, Croatia announced that it will adopt ODF and PDF as a basis for electronic document exchange by public administrations. While Open XML is not yet included in Croatia’s list of approved standards, the government did not mandate the exclusive use of ODF and remains open to evaluating and including other standards. Microsoft is working with the Croatian government and expects Open XML to join the list of permissible standards over the next several months. Croatia’s approach here is consistent with its established policy of technical neutrality and choice in the purchase of open source and proprietary software.

Germany: Allows technology-neutral advancement of standards

In August 2007, Germany voted to approve with comments ISO’s adoption of Open XML. Gerd Schürman, Director of the Fraunhofer FOKUS eGovernment Laboratory, favored Germany’s decision: “The standardization process of Open XML as an ISO standard will start now and result in the technological advancement of both standards, Open XML and ODF 1.0.”

U.S. STATES

Massachusetts: Supports open document format standards without vendor or commercial bias

In August 2007, Massachusetts added Open XML to its Enterprise Technical Reference Model’s (“ETRM”) list of approved standards, defeating calls for an ODF-mandate. In a joint statement, Massachusetts undersecretary of administration and finance, Henry Dormitzer, and the commonwealth’s acting chief information officer, Bethann Pepoli, explained that concerns about competing document standards were “outweighed substantially by the benefits of moving toward open, XML-based” standards. The ETRM articulates a vision of a service-oriented architecture where information can be shared, reused and repurposed based on XML technologies … The availability of open, standardized XML document formats without vendor bias will move us further along in realizing this vision.”

Texas: ODF implementation costs too high and credibility too low

High implementation costs helped to scuttle legislation that would have required ODF for electronic documents in Texas. A Financial Impact Report put the five-year cost of documents and applications connected to ODF in the hundreds of millions of dollars. While press reports indicated that ODF proponents privately relayed “gleaming” reports about ODF implementation in Massachusetts to Texas legislators, the same proponents refused to clarify publicly under oath that only a handful of computers in Massachusetts had actually been converted to ODF. This lack of credibility led Texas legislators, including Jonathan Mathers, chief clerk for the Committee on Government Reform in the Texas House of Representatives, to start to “question the whole bill.”

Florida: Interoperability, not premature snap judgments, should be key

In November 2007, the Florida Senate Committee on Governmental Operations acknowledged that the “most important issue for agencies choosing technology is not whether that system is proprietary or open source but whether that system is interoperable.” The Florida House Committee on Audit & Performance agreed and asserted that it is “premature” to adopt a document format standard “before an industry-wide national standard has been established.”

Minnesota: No standard mandates without careful study

The need for careful study trumped the urge for premature mandates when the Minnesota legislature opted to engage in careful study of document format standards instead of requiring state agencies to use ODF. Don Betzold, an original sponsor of the bill, questioned whether he and other Minnesota legislators had enough expertise at all to choose the technical standard: “I wouldn’t know an open document format if it bit me on the butt,” Betzold said. “We’re public policy experts. [Picking technical standards] is not our job.”

Oregon: ODF is too expensive to implement

The high costs associated with conversion to ODF contributed to the failure of legislation introduced in the Oregon House after Oregon’s secretary of state questioned the cost of converting to applications that support open formats.

Others States: Saying no to document format preferences

Efforts to require use of certain open document formats failed to gain support in California and Connecticut as well.

The technology world is one of many buzzwords and phrases, one that you hear a lot at the moment is “Service Oriented Architecture” or “SOA” which sounds like a highly technical methodology for systems design, in reality SOA techniques can provide a very effective way of dealing with organizational complexity and divides as we work towards delivering cross departmental government services over the web.

During the final months of 1995 I found myself involved for the first time in an eGovernment project. The goal of the project was a simple one, we were tasked with providing a single “Smart Form” that would allow an individual to register as being self employed. Delivering this involved working with business processes in three government agencies, two involved in taxation and one involved in employment registration.

We looked at the challenge ahead as technologies and developers and decided that this would not be a complex system to design or build. After all, it was just a single form, digitising a single well defined process…

About two weeks into the systems analysis phase of the project the enormity of the challenge ahead started to become clearer. Simple data like a name or an address was not stored in the same way across the three agencies. The processes that we were concatenating into our single form were all being run with different service level agreements and delivering on each agreement was quite rightly something that was taken very seriously by the owners of each service. Finally it was also clear that the small amounts of addition overhead of work that would be need to run our single service just didn’t belong in any of the three agencies, and in turn didn’t have any manpower or budget in place to run it.

As a technology company the project soon began to look more like a nightmare than an opportunity, of course for the government we were working with these were exactly the types of lessons that they wanted to learn as they planned for a broader set of projects across the wider civil service.

It is interesting to look back on projects like that today and consider what has changed in the world of technology and how we might approach the project differently in today’s world. The simple answer is that these are exactly the types of challenges that information technology and large systems design principals now take in their stride.

The industry today talks a great deal about Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) which is a technical term for breaking systems into their constituent parts, and then publishing them so they can be used elsewhere while having minimal impact on the organization that provides the service.

In a Government context the advantages are clear. In a SOA world it is no longer critical that data needs to be managed in exactly the same way in every department, or that business processes need to be redesigned with the workings of the rest of the government in mind.

Today every government department can look at the services that it offers, be it licence issuance, tax collection or any other process, and then use simple web service technology to enable those services to be used by other departments or external commercial providers seamlessly.

The benefits are easy to see. Services are less complex and less costly to design and provide. With the right planning around national level architecture and data management, cross government services can be built without the need for costly and complex systems integration projects.

In some cases an agency who makes their particular line of business application available as a web service will find it being used in useful new ways by other government departments or by commercial organizations to provide services to citizens and businesses in ways that had not previously been thought about or funded.

My former team in Redmond put a lot of time and effort into looking at the right high level framework for this sort of environment would look like, the resulting work was called the “Connected Government Framework” or CGF for short. Today you will find the basic framework that the team delivered integrated tightly into many of the solutions and service offerings from Microsoft and our partners.

The lessons from this complex fifteen year journey help us deal with some of tougher issues that just about every government is facing today as they put their own plans in place for the delivery of online and electronic services. Not least of which are the still those same issues of shared service level agreements and data harmonization. Service Oriented Architectures and the technologies involved assist us in delivering complex business systems without the need to closely couple organizations or data in ways that may otherwise be less natural.

23/1/08 additional: Government Computer News this morning carries information on the release of Microsoft’s Citizen Service Platform, an announcement that was made at the Government Leader’s Forum in Berlin yesterday. Follow this link to read more;

Microsoft’s Citizen Service Platform incorporates the company’s work with local and regional governments over the past several years, and consists of templates designed to run in Microsoft operating environments for the most commonly deployed e-government services.

Microsoft will offer the initial set of online services to governments for customization and integration into their current environment later this year.

I woke up this morning to find that for the second time in a month the URL for the blog was no longer directed to anything.

Last time I just recreated the addon domain that was configured for http://osrin.net, but it seems that was not enough. Today I’ve established a new account and set the domain the primary one for that account - we’ll see if that helps.

The backup I had was for the day I left for the US last week, I managed to recover the lost posts of mine from an RSS feed but it seems that I’ve lost any comments from before 16th January, my apologies.

I have a couple more things to fix still… the links from the about page and the blogroll, and will get to them in the next 48 hours. If you find anything else on the site that does not work as it should then please drop me a note.

What a complex and confusing world we live in.

This is a really good step for all involved. IBM and Google are starting to support OpenXML, Microsoft provides access to ODF files from Office…

…customers get choice, all is well with the world!

Maybe.

Several of my Microsoft colleagues are blogging this morning about a comment that Brian Jones posted yesterday. Brian announces two things that the company is doing to support developers and organizations that want to understand the relationship between the binary file formats and OpenXML and/or manage conversions between the two.

1. The specifications for the binary file formats will be placed under the Open Specification Promise (OSP). This means that any developer is now able to gain access to these specifications without the need to contact Microsoft or sign any agreement. The file format documentation has been available since 2006 under a RAND-Z licence through the process described in this knowledge base article, the further step of applying the OSP to the documentation simplifies the process further.

2. There will be a project established on Sourceforge to build a converter between the binary files (.doc, .xls, .ppt) and the new OpenXML format (.docx, .pptx, .xlsx). This means there will be libraries available under the BSD license that clearly demonstrate the mapping between the two file formats that can again be used by any developer as a reference.

Brian’s post carries the text from one of TC45’s proposed dispositions that relates to this decision;

We believe that Interoperability between applications conforming to DIS 29500 is established at the Office Open XML-to- Office Open XML file construct level only.

Prescriptive guidance on, or tools to enable, transformation from Microsoft Office  “binary” file formats (i.e., .doc., .xls, and .ppt) (the “Binary Formats”) to Office Open XML formatted files is not the intention or in scope of DIS 29500.  As a result this request is outside the bounds of this process.

It is important to note that substantial use is being made of both the Binary Formats and Office Open XML in the marketplace today.  Many products (such as OpenOffice.org) support the Binary Formats. Microsoft has indicated that many companies and public institutions have received the documentation for the Binary Formats, and are working with it at this time, and can create mappings between the Binary Formats and Office Open XML. Translators from the Binary Formats  to XML formats such as ODF have already been developed and are in wide use. For example, the Sun ODF Plug-in for Microsoft Office (http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/112/3/sw/18208) states that  “The plug-in allows users the ability to seamlessly convert Microsoft Office documents to and from ODF. The ODF plug-in supports Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint”.

Likewise, there is widespread use of Office Open XML in the marketplace today across platforms and applications.  A few examples include the implementations released by Apple (Mac OS X Leopard, iWork 08, iPhone), Adobe (InDesign), Microsoft (Office 2007, Office 2003, Office XP, Office 2000, Office 2008 Mac OS X), Novell (Suse Open Office), Google (Search / Preview), Mindjet (MindManager), Intergen, OpenXML/ODF Translator (Open Source project on Sourceforge), Dataviz (DocumentsToGo on Palm OS, MacLinkPlus on Mac OS X Leopard), NeoOffice, Altova (XMLSpy), MarkLogic (XML Content Server), Datawatch (Monarch Pro), QuickOffice  (QuickOffice Premier 5.0 on Symbian), Altsoft (XML2PDF Server 2007) and those under development by Corel (WordPerfect), AbiWord, Gnome (GNumeric),  Xandros, Linspire, Turbolinux and others.  These implementations are now available on many platforms, including Linux, the Macintosh, Windows, and handheld devices (PalmOS, Symbian, iPhone, and Windows Mobile).

The widespread use of both  Binary Formats and Office Open XML formats indicates that, at this time, 3^rd party can use both formats and build mappings between them.

Nonetheless, Ecma International discussed this subject with Microsoft Corporation, the author of the Binary Formats.  To make it even easier for third party conversion of Binary Format-to-DIS 29500, Microsoft agreed to:

· Initiate a Binary Format-to-ISO/IEC JTC 1 DIS 29500 Translator Project on the open source software development web site SourceForge (http://sourceforge.net/ ) in collaboration with independent software vendors.  The Translator Project will create software tools, plus guidance, showing how a document written using the Binary Formats can be translated to DIS 29500.  The Translator will be available under the open source Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) license, and anyone can use the mapping, submit bugs and feedback, or contribute to the Project.  The Translator Project will start on February 15, 2008.

· Make it even easier to get access to the  Binary Formats documentation by posting it and making it available for a direct download on the Microsoft web site no later than February 15, 2008.  The Binary Formats have been under a covenant not to sue and Microsoft will also make them available under its Open Specification Promise (see www.microsoft.com/interop/osp) by the time they are posted.

We will modify DIS 29500 to include an informative reference to the SourceForge project.

This is great news for a number of developers in the Asia Pacific region that I have worked with over the last year, the request for this has been raised both as part of the ISO process and additionally by developers who are already working with the file formats outside of that process.

At this time of year every Microsoft employee is asked to consider the last six months, evaluate what they have achieved and plan for the coming six months. Part of the planning will always be about evolving work that has been taking place in the first half of the year, and part of it will be about thinking about the year ahead in terms of the personal and business goals that the employee wants to carry forwards.

Working for any large corporation in a pan-Asia role presents some unique challenges in terms of setting measurable and well defined personal goals. The region is about as diverse as can be, developing economies sitting side by side with some of the richest and most prosperous nations in the world.

Part of my role in the coming year will be focused on continuing to evolve Microsoft’s role in the development and adoption of ICT standards in the region, another part of my role will be to continue the conversations that have been started over the last six months around the use of technology in the region from which we continue to learn a great deal, and a further part of it will be to work internally with the wider corporation to understand the implications and responsibilities that both of these activities bring to the rest of the business.

When I begin to think about what I would like to add to the goal sheet for the coming year or so I have a few thoughts buzzing around in my mind that needs a little more consideration. One of those stems from a speech that Muhammad Yunas gave at Microsoft’s Government Leader’s Forum in Beijing in April ‘07.

For those who may not know him, Dr. Yunas was the recipient of the Nobel Prize for Peace in 2005, the prize was awarded based upon his work establishing Grameen Bank and the subsequent success that the bank had in pioneering micro-financing alongside communities in Bangladesh.

As part of the question and answer session Dr Yunas was asked why he was so passionate about working on innovative projects in the developing world, his answer has been the subject of a great deal of thought for me over the last nine months or so and it was as follows; (this is from memory, so I apologize if it is not word perfect!)

“Imagine all the inventions that you know in the world today, and consider the fact that the vast majority of those have been brought to us by less than a fifth of the population of the planet while the remaining four fifths struggle with issues of education, healthcare, and access to the basic necessities of life. Now imagine what the world would be like if we could solve these problems, releasing the creative talents of another five billion people, what type of world would we all be able to live in then?”

When I think about that statement and why it had such a profound effect on me I end up with the following two conclusions.

The first is that these problems are not property of one part of the world but all of us, solving these types of issue has the potential to bring substantial benefits to every individual, not just those who are disenfranchised today. Frequently I see individuals and corporations trying to “help” with projects in developing nations, if I am understanding the point that Dr. Yunus was making it was that it is not so much help  that is needed as a levelling of disparities, one result of that levelling being advantages for all of us.

The second is a thought around scale. In recent years I have witnessed many experiments involving technology in the developing world, many are approached with the technology in mind rather than the actual problem that is being solved and many  of these projects aim to prove that a problem can be solved but then fail to scale beyond the initial project.

So, what is the additional personal goal for 2008?

I think it is a simple sounding goal of self education. I’m keen to start by understanding the problems at hand  and what can be done that will truly help by companies like ours, and I’m keen to understand what role software has to play in the wider solutions that are needed as the developing nations around Asia find their rightful place in the world economy.

There are, of course, large numbers of people in Microsoft who spend their days thinking about the role of software in the developing world, but I want to build my own understanding and then see if I come to the same conclusions as the wider corporation.

There are quite a large number of regional individuals who read this blog now, including a growing contingent from India, China, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. I would welcome any pointers that you think are relevant to this topic, however basic you think they might be. I’m not starting from scratch, but am happy to review whatever preconceptions I currently have. Please feel free to hit the “contact” button above, or post ideas in the comments section of this post.

It has been a busy week on the OpenXML front, I have been travelling for the last few days and have just spent the last 30 minutes trying to catch up on the long list in my inbox. Three of the items stand out;

1. Accessibility. A group of accessibility experts have worked on reviewing Ecma-376 (DIS29500) and have produced a set of guidelines for developers wanting to use the rich set of accessibility features contained within the spec.

The report itself can be downloaded from the OpenXMLDeveloper site by following this link. The abstract from the start of the document reads;

This document is a guide for applications that support DIS 29500 (ECMA 376 Office Open XML) specification with the goal of encouraging the creation of accessible Office Open XML documents. Office Open XML provides a rich infrastructure for creating content that meets the needs of people with disabilities. This document’s guidance must be followed in order to ensure Office Open XML implementations are consistent with respect to their support for accessibility at both the application and output level. Authors and developers are encouraged to follow these guidelines in order to enable users with disabilities to consume content or to extract the full meaning of Office Open XML documents.

2. The Burton Group look at OpenXML and ODF. Mary Jo Foley covers this for ZDNet. The Burton Group have issued an independently generated 37 page report that looks at the state document formats in the context of OpenXML and ODF, the conclusions reached by the two authors are very favourable towards the work that we have been doing with OpenXML in recent years. The ZDNet coverage opens with;

Market researchers with the Burton Group have issued a 37-page study–not commissioned by Microsoft or any other tech vendor–that finds Microsoft’s OOXML document format to be more useful than the rival ODF format backed by Microsoft’s competitors.

The report is called “What’s up DOC?” and can be downloaded from The Burton Group here. (registration required)

3. DIS29500 Proposed Dispositions Complete. Finally, several blogs are reporting that Ecma International’s TC45 working group have hit their milestone of responding to all 3522 comments with proposed dispositions. The full report from Ecma can be found here, and Microsoft’s representative on TC45, Brian Jones, talks about the milestone here. From Brian’s blog;

It’s been a ton of hard work over the past several months, and it really feels great to move onto the final stage of this process (I need some sleep). It’s unbelievable how much work we’ve been able to accomplish within TC45. Similar to how we moved from a 2,000 page spec to a 6,000 in 2006, in 2007 we were able to respond to 3,500 comments and generated a 2,300 page document (a bit less that a page per comment) where I believe we were able to successfully handle the national bodies comments.

Doug Mahugh is a member of the INCITS V1 Committee in the US, in his review of the the proposed dispositions he characterizes them in the following way;

• Addition of useful information for developers, such as the thorough documentation of compat settings. Want to know what it means to “autospace like Word 95″ or “truncate font heights like WP6″? That’s all spelled out now, so that any developer can implement these behaviors.
• New flexibility in the formats, such as extensible page borders, support for new types of content, and new options for date handling. Want to use ISO 8601 dates in an Open XML spreadsheet? Now you can.
• Standards support. Dozens of international standards are normatively referenced in the proposed changes, making DIS 29500 a well-socialized and well-connected member of the international standards family. A good example is the use of ISO/IEC 14977:1996 (Syntactic metalanguage – Extended BNF) notation for spreadsheet formulas and fields.
• Structural changes to allow for selective re-use of specific portions of the standard. One of the proposed changes would make OPC (Open Packaging Convention) and MCE (Markup Compatibility and Extensibility) separate parts, so that other standards can normatively reference these useful technologies separately from the rest of DIS 29500.
• Clarification of numerous details, including conformance requirements, algorithms, syntactical details, and much more.
• Correction of errors and typos that have made some of the details confusing in the past.

The next six weeks will be spent preparing for the Ballot Resolution Meeting in Geneva, which will be held at the end of February. Several delegations are attending from various national standards bodies here in Asia.

The grant of rights to the intellectual property contained in Open XML comes up in conversation from time to time, both within the national standards bodies and in forums on the web.

For a while now I’ve been trying to work out how best to share the details of the work that Microsoft has done in this area; it is an important topic from whichever angle you look at it. The comfort level of the community around this issue, and the simplicity of the way that the rights are granted, directly relate to how the final specification will be used when the ISO process is completed later this year.

One of the documents that I have been sharing with groups who have asked me questions on this topic is a simple FAQ that responds to many of the conversation points that have been raised.

I thought it might help if I just posted that FAQ on this site. So, here it is;

Executive Summary: Microsoft has made legal commitments to Ecma International, to ISO/IEC, and to all interested users and vendors that anyone can use and implement Open XML without IPR burdens. Microsoft believes that it is in everyone’s interest for this open file format to be available freely and easily for document exchange and preservation. When Microsoft submitted and turned over control of Open XML to the international standardization process, Microsoft also provided multiple options to ensure that its essential patents can be used by anyone, including OSS developers. These IPR commitments go beyond the requirements for ISO/IEC adoption of a standard, and ISO/IEC and Ecma have stated specifically that there are no IPR issues with Open XML.

Any Required Microsoft Patent Rights Are Available On A Royalty-Free, Perpetual Basis To All Implementers, And Both ISO/IEC And Ecma Have Publicly Declared that No IPR Issues Exist.

Microsoft made a patent declaration to Ecma and agreed to make any of its patents covering Open XML available consistent with Ecma’s “Code of Conduct for Patent Matters.” (See this link and this link)

Microsoft also submitted to ISO/IEC a “Patent Statement and Licensing Declaration Form.” The ISO/IEC form provides three checkboxes: (a) willing to license necessary patent claims on RAND-Z (royalty-free) terms, (b) willing to license necessary claims on RAND (royalty-bearing) terms, and (c) unwilling to license necessary claims under (a) or (b). (See link) Microsoft checked the first box. That means that if someone asks for a RAND-Z license to implement Open XML, we must provide such a license.

Microsoft also attached to its ISO/IEC patent declaration a commitment that implementers of Open XML would have the benefit of our “Open Specification Promise” (OSP) and our “Covenant Not to Sue” (CNS) as an alternative, if they prefer.

Microsoft thus has gone much further than what Ecma and ISO/IEC require. Both require that a company offer to license its necessary patent claims on RAND terms (which could include a royalty). Microsoft has instead offered all implementers their choice between (a) a negotiated RAND-Z license, (b) the OSP, or (c) the CNS, all three of which provide for royalty-free use of Microsoft’s necessary patent claims.

Indeed, Ecma and ISO/IEC have publicly stated that there are no IPR concerns with Open XML. In a document explaining the upcoming Ballot Resolution Meeting (BRM), ISO/IEC noted that IPR issues will not be discussed, because, “IPR decisions have previously been delegated by all the ISO/IEC and IEC members (NBs) to the CEOs of IEC and ISO/IEC, and they in turn have examined them and found no outstanding problems.”  (emphasis added). Ecma issued a similar statement. (Sec. 2.2).

Thus, to recap, because the BRM and comment process is designed to ensure that the specification is fully and correctly defined, and because ISO/IEC has found no outstanding IP issues, there are no IPR issues associated with Open XML that should raise concerns about implementation, long-term document retention, preservation, or accessibility.

Adoption of Open XML — Including By the Open Source Community — is Growing Exponentially, Underscoring that Developers and Customers are Comfortable that there Are No IPR Issues with Open XML. 

Thousands of developers, organizations, governments, and professionals spanning 67 countries and six continents have already expressed public support for Open XML and for its approval by ISO/IEC. (See OpenXMLCommunity.org and OpenXMLDeveloper.org) More than 2,000 members have joined OpenXMLCommunity.org, and hundreds of independent software vendors are developing solutions using Open XML.

A growing number of implementations of Open XML — including from open source developers – are becoming available, including those released by Apple (Mac OS X Leopard, iWork 08, iPhone), Adobe (InDesign), Novell (SUSE Open Office), Microsoft (Office 2007, Office 2003, Office XP, Office 2000), Mindjet (MindManager), Palm Intergen, OpenText (LiveLink), Dataviz (DocumentsToGo on Palm OS), NeoOffice, and Altova (XMLSpy), as well as those under development by Corel (WordPerfect), Gnome (GNumeric), Xandros, Linspire, Turbolinux, and others.  These implementations are now available on many platforms, including Linux, Macintosh, Windows, Java, .NET, and handheld devices (PalmOS, Symbian, Windows Mobile).

Key Aspects Of Microsoft’s OSP

Any required Microsoft patent rights are freely available to all developers and customers of
Open XML in either open source software or proprietary software.

By stating that the covenant is “irrevocable,” Microsoft has assured users that there will not be a change in company policy at any point in the future.

Vendors, distributors, and users of Open XML implementations benefit from the OSP just like implementers do. Consequently, there is no need for implementers to pass the promise on to others in their distribution channel, as it is always available to everyone directly.

No one needs to sign anything or even reference Microsoft to take advantage of the OSP.

This form of patent non-assert enables open source software implementations. It is especially convenient for open source software developers as there is no issue as to whether or not the IP is sub-licenseable.

The OSP applies whether a party has a full or partial implementation. Parties get the same irrevocable promise from Microsoft either way.

Leaders In The Open Source Community Have Applauded Microsoft’s Extensive IPR Commitments To Open XML.

“I am [] impressed with the new covenant, and am pleased to see that Microsoft is expanding its use of what I consider to be a highly desirable tool for facilitating the implementation of open standards, in particular where those standards are of interest to the open source community. … I think that this move should be greeted with approval, and that Microsoft deserves to be congratulated for this action. I hope that the standards affected will only be the first of many that Microsoft, and hopefully other patent owners as well, benefit with similar pledges.” — Andy Updegrove, Standards Expert and Industry Analyst 

“The Microsoft open specification promise is a very positive development. In the university and open source communities, we need to know that we can implement specifications freely. This promise will make it easier for us to implement Web Services protocols and information cards and for them to be used in our communities.” – RL “Bob” Morgan, Chair, Middleware Architecture Committee for Education (MACE) Senior Technology Architect, University of Washington

Microsoft’s OSP and CNS are Very Similar to the IPR Commitments of IBM and Sun for ODF and Other Specifications.

The OSP and CNS are very similar to IBM’s Interoperability Specification Pledge (applicable to ODF) and Sun’s ODF Patent Statement. 

Notably, in the key areas of (1) versions of the standard covered, (2) application to required and optional portions, (3) non-application to referenced technologies, (4) limitation to conforming implementations (or portions of implementations) of the specification, and (5) definition of “necessary claims,” the OSP is broadly similar (and in many cases identical) to the IBM and Sun IPR commitments.

This is further evidence that Microsoft’s IPR approach for Open XML is reasonable and common in the industry, and that attacks on it are baseless.

FAQs

Q: Why are you applying both the CNS and the OSP to Open XML?

A: To afford greater choice to the developer, implementer, and user communities. Microsoft formulated the CNS and made it available in October 2005. After working with a number of members of the OSS community, Microsoft fine tuned its covenant and launched its OSP in 2006. The OSP was created to facilitate easier, royalty-free access to a range of Microsoft technologies and IP, including the Open XML formats, by all developers across both proprietary and OSS platforms. We don’t know whether some will choose the OSP over the CNS, or vice versa, but again we wanted to make that an option for all rather than simply terminate the CNS when the OSP came along.

Q: Why doesn’t the OSP apply to things that are merely referenced in the specification?

A: It is a common practice that technology licenses focus on the specifics of what is detailed in the specification(s) and exclude what are frequently called “enabling technologies.” If we included patent claims to the enabling technology, then as an extreme example, it could be argued that one needs computer and operating system patents to implement almost any information technology specification. No such broad patent licenses to referenced technologies are ever given for specific industry standards. (See Andy Updegrove Comment (“[T]his is a common limitation ….”).

Q: Why doesn’t the OSP apply to all versions of the standard, including future revisions?

A: The Open Specification Promise applies to all existing versions of the specification(s) designated on the public list posted on this page, unless otherwise noted with respect to a particular specification (see, for example, specific notes related to web services specifications). This approach is common in standards licensing. Standards in the IT industry are generally dynamic, evolving over time through different versions to reflect the experience of implementation and deployment, as well as the changing nature of the environment. Since it is impossible for industry players to predict the future environment, they are generally unwilling to make an open ended commitment towards such unknown matters, such as future versions of a standard. Microsoft’s OSP, and IBM’s pledge, and Sun’s covenants address the issue of the applicability of the covenant or promise to future versions of their list of specifications. Microsoft and IBM limit the applicability to those specifications listed in the statement, which will be amended over time as new versions are developed. Sun, by contrast, limits the applicability of its statement to subsequent versions of any specification “in which development Sun participates to the point of incurring an obligation as defined by the rules of OASIS, to grant” a licence or issue a covenant. While the former approach reflects standard industry practice, there is obviously potential uncertainty in respect of future versions, until they have been incorporated into the list. The latter approach, however, also generates uncertainty, as the inquiry that the relying party has to undertake would seem onerous, i.e., about the nature of Sun’s participation under OASIS rules.

– Andy Updegrove: “As with traditional standard setting commitments, patent owners are wary about making open-ended promises, since in an extreme case a competitor could seek to extend a standard to describe part of, or all of a product of a patent owner, going far beyond what had been anticipated by the owner at the time that it made its commitment. Although there are differences from organization to organization, typically when a new version of a standard is approved, a member remains bound by so much of the standard as does not change, but is not bound by any new material that is added to it unless it is then a member, and agrees to do so.” 

Q: Why does the OSP cover only “required portions” of the specification?

A: This is commonplace in the standards industry and is also how IBM’s patent commitment works. Andy Updegrove: “This is the degree to which the great majority of standards organizations require a commitment.” But Microsoft’s commitment goes further by extending royalty-free access to the required elements of optional portions of the Open XML specification as well.

Q: Why doesn’t the OSP also contain a royalty-free copyright commitment?

A: Since Ecma owns the copyright in the Open XML standard and makes the standard freely available under copyright, a copyright license from Microsoft is not needed for Open XML.

Q: If you just give away the IP, why do you even bother with filing patents that relate to Open XML?

A: IPR incentive systems and patents provide individuals and companies with incentives to create and innovate. It is a common business practice to file patents on inventions and innovations. It often makes business sense and is common practice for companies to license patents on royalty-free terms, and/or contribute technologies on royalty-free terms to industry efforts such as standardization. Often such patents and royalty-free contributions can ensure the standards specifications are available on royalty-free terms, and “protect” implementers from individuals or companies not participating in the standards process who may wish to profit from the standard by charging a royalty.

Q: Is this OSP sub-licenseable?

A: There is no need for sublicensing. This promise is directly applicable to you and everyone else who wants to use it. Accordingly, your distributees, customers and vendors can directly take advantage of this same promise, and have the exact same protection that you have.

Can Microsoft revoke the OSP and does it ever expire?

A: No, Microsoft’s promise is an irrevocable promise. It is subject to some minimal restrictions that are industry standard.