Oliver Bell’s Weblog

Yesterday’s DII workshop on ODF and SP2 is all done. It was great to be a part of the conversation and to meet many of the people that I have only ever known through blogs and online.

From my point of view it was really helpful to hear experts in this field discussion document standards in general along with what it will take for Microsoft to deliver ODF in a way that balances the needs of several different constituents (standards professionals, governments, regulators and users).

I’m sure we’ll see posts with all the details over the next 48 hours as people make their way home, and it is probably best that I let others share their perspective on the conversation rather than me doing it.

For now you’ll find posts from Jesper Lund Stocholm and John Head that get things off to a good start. Also, a couple of Microsoft folks have posts up, Stephen McGibbon and Doug Mahugh.

I’ll add other links here as they appear.

Additions;

Gray Knowlton - Redmond ODF workshop feels pretty good

John D. Head - Thoughts on the Microsoft ODF Workshop

Jesper Lund Stocholm - DII ODF workshop catch-up, round table discussions

Dennis Hamilton - Microsoft ODF Interoperability Workshop

Doug Mahugh - Guiding Principles for Office’s ODF implementation

Hrvoje Benko has some info about a prototype interactive spherical display on his blog today.

Our prototype device builds on a commercially available globe projection system (Global Imagination’s Magic Planet). We have added touch-sensing capabilities with an infrared camera that shares the optical path with the projector. This novel configuration permits us to enclose both the projection and the sensing mechanism in the base of the device and allows for easy 360 degrees access to the device and high degree of interactivity without shadowing or occlusion problems. We have also developed a custom graphics projection pipeline that solves the distortion problems and enables projected data to be correctly visualized on the curved surface.

PC World New Zealand have additional commentary;

Microsoft is thinking outside the box when it comes to futuristic computer designs — literally.
The company today is showing off a prototype of its Sphere computer at Microsoft’s Research Faculty Summit in Redmond, Wash. The Sphere, which is a research prototype and not a finished product, is a multi-user, touch-sensitive display. An orb replaces a traditional flat-screen monitor

… and Gizmodo has more pictures and some additional technical background.

Fun technology.

During his keynote on Thursday at OSCON Peter Salus reminded us that many of the stories that we discuss today about technology are just replayed from years past, the names change and the scale grows but the stories are fundamentally the same.

Increasingly I find myself involved in discussions about IPv6 implementation, it was discussed at the OECD Ministerial on The Future of The Internet two months ago in Korea, and it will be central to discussions at the next IGF forum in India in December.

One of Peter’s stories related to a problem that was dealt with in the early days of the ARPAnet, when they ran out of network address space in 1974. Sound familiar?

A quick search unearthed a fascinating write up on the origins of the Internet on NetValley.com, it is labeled as a story told to Bernard Aboba by Vint Cerf.

The paragraph in the story that supports Dr. Salus’ comment reads;

The original design of 1973 and 1974 contemplated a total of 256 networks. There was only one LAN at PARC, and all the other networks were regional or nationwide networks. We didn’t think there would be more than 256 research networks involved. When it became clear there would be a lot of local area networks, we invented the concept of Class A, B, and C addresses. In Class C there were several million network IDs. But the problem that was not foreseen was that the routing protocols and Internet topology were not well suited for handling an extremely large number of network IDs. So people preferred to use Class B and subnetting instead. We have a rather sparsely allocated address space in the current Internet design, with Class B allocated to excess and Class A and C allocated only lightly.

The history raises some interesting points, especially as we are now talking more and more about the need to roll out IPv6.

Back in 1974 there were many fewer nodes on the internet, and all of them run by research and academic organizations. The flaw in the original design was something that could be fixed quickly across the limited number of networks as the idea of class A, B, and C addresses was adopted and implemented in the way that Dr. Cerf describes.

Clearly the Internet today is significantly more complex, involving a diverse array of software and hardware from many hundreds of thousands of providers from around the globe.

Rolling forwards in time a little to 1998 I found this story, originally from WindowsITPro. The story reminds us that there was a strong belief that we would run out of Class B addresses in March of 1994, but through the invention of standards for network address translation and other address management tricks we were able to push that date out to somewhere between 2005 and 2010. The story also points us towards RFC 1792, a specification that was originally published in January 1995 detailing what we know as IPv6.

For what it is worth, the software and hardware industry are pretty close to being ready for implementation, you can follow Microsoft’s progress here.

In the Internet centric world that we live in today the implementation of IPv6 not only relieves pressures that we feel on available address space but it also makes a whole host of new scenarios possible as the ability to grant an address to every device on the planet becomes a reality.

We all have a role to play in pushing forwards with IPv6 implementation. Here are a few things you can personally do to do your part and get yourself ready;

First learn a little about IPv6 itself, there are plenty of sites that provide information and training. Here is one example, or Microsoft’s own primer which is here.

Second you can work out what is going on in your country around IPv6 backbone support. Almost every country around the region has at least a grass roots effort to drive IPv6 adoption. Here are examples from Australia, India and the Pacific Islands.

Third, learn a little about technologies like Teredo Tunneling, which provides mechanisms for tunneling IPv6 traffic over existing IPv4 networks.

Fourth, keep track of the growing number of operating systems, applications and pieces of hardware that are IPv6 compliant.

Finally, think about the applications where IPv6 services would help your organization recognize more value of our your networked assets and look for opportunities to use the technology.

Moving beyond the network address issues of 1974 took a little creative work by the entire internet community, moving from IPv4 to IPv6 will involve the same level of participation - but this time from an exponentially larger community!

We all have a part to play, they managed the change last time, we can do it again.

Several blogs are reporting on the highlights from Sam Ramji’s keynote at OSCON this morning.

Sam announced several items of significance that will dramatically advance the work that Microsoft is already doing with the Open Source developer community.

This is one of those posts where I’m probably better off quoting several others rather than sharing my own commentary.

First of all, from Sam’s blog;

PHP on IIS + SQL:  Microsoft is contributing a patch to ADOdb, a popular data access layer for PHP used by many applications.  The patch enables support for SQL Server through the new “native driver for PHP” built by the SQL Server team.  ADOdb is licensed under the LGPL and BSD.  This is our first code contribution to PHP community projects but will not be the last.

and;

Open Specification Promise:  Microsoft is putting a wide range of protocols that were formerly in the Communications Protocol Program under the Open Specification Promise (OSP).  This guarantees their freedom from any patent claims from Microsoft now or in the future, and includes both Microsoft-developed and industry-developed protocols. 

We have established a clarification to the OSP that guarantees developer rights to build software of any kind and for any purpose using these specifications, including commercial use.

and;

Apache Software Foundation: Microsoft is becoming a sponsor of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF).  This sponsorship will enable the ASF to pay administrators and other support staff so that ASF developers can focus on writing great software.

Finally Sam wraps up his post with a couple of statements that should be obvious, although I know without them then incorrect conclusions would no doubt be jumped to!

It is not a move away from IIS as Microsoft’s strategic web server technology.  We have invested significantly in refactoring and adding new, state-of-the-art features to IIS, including support for PHP.  We will continue to invest in IIS for the long term and are currently under way with development of IIS 8.

It is a strong endorsement of The Apache Way, and opens a new chapter in our relationship with the ASF.  We have worked with Apache POI, Apache Axis2, Jakarta, and other projects in the last year, and we will continue our technical support and interoperability testing work for this open source software.

You will find more details of the specifics of the announcements over at Sam’s blog.

Andy Oliver over at the Open Source Initiative had the following to say;

I have been working with Sam Ramji and Robert Duffner from Microsoft, and I have been very pleased to resolve the issues that I had with the work they are funding for the Apache POI project. Not only has Microsoft addressed the concerns that I had with regards to patents and OOXML, but they have gone a step further and added the binary formats to the list. By publishing their clarifications to the Open Specification Promise (OSP), Microsoft has acted both in good faith and purpose. For me personally, this is a big step forward. At one time, I donated my Open Source project to Apache, partially out of fear of Microsoft. Now, Microsoft is becoming a key contributor to this project.

Looking at the details behind the OSP component of Sam’s keynote.

Richard Wilder also has a post of his own on Port25. Richard is an Associate General Council at Microsoft and talks about the evolution of the OSP in line with requests that have come to us over the last few months. His post focuses on some significant work that has been undertaken on the OSP Q&A page.

The new Q&A puts many more specifications under the OSP, and makes several clarifications for Open Source Developers;

Q: Is the Open Specification Promise intended to apply to open source developers and users of open source developed software?

A: Yes. The OSP applies directly to all persons or entities that make, use, sell, offer for sale, imports and/or distributes an implementation of a Covered Specification. It is intended to enable open source implementations, and in fact several parties in the open source community have specifically stated that the OSP meets their needs. Moreover there are already a significant number of implementations of Covered Specifications that have been created and/or distributed under a variety of open source licenses as well as under proprietary software development models. Because open source software licenses can vary you may want to consult with your legal counsel to understand your particular legal environment.

Q: Is this Promise consistent with open source licensing, namely the GPL? And can anyone implement the specification(s) without any concerns about Microsoft patents?

A: The Open Specification Promise is a simple and clear way to assure that the broadest audience of developers and customers working with commercial or open source software can implement the covered specification(s). We leave it to those implementing these technologies to understand the legal environments in which they operate. This includes people operating in a GPL environment. Because the General Public License (GPL) is not universally interpreted the same way by everyone, we can’t give anyone a legal opinion about how our language relates to the GPL or other OSS licenses, but based on feedback from the open source community we believe that a broad audience of developers can implement the specification(s).

I would encourage you to read the entire Q&A to understand the full scope of the rework.

Richard’s post also talks about the required level of conformance that is needed for implementations to be covered by the OSP, a topic that has driven a lot of debate for those of us in SE Asia, New Zealand and Australia.

The OSP says that it covers “any implementation to the extent it conforms to a Covered Specification” which addresses the heart of the conformance issue that was raised.” To the extent it conforms” means that we do not require an implementation to be perfect; this can be because of implementation bugs or an intentional choice because the requirements of the particular implementation do not actually require full conformance. Under the OSP, implementations can be less than fully compliant.

Again, I would encourage you to read Richard’s entire post  to understand the full context.

Reactions so far have been extremely positive.

Matt Asay writes;

This is very cool. It’s also cool that Microsoft accompanied this announcement with a $100,000 pledge to the Apache Software Foundation. Andy Oliver of the Open Source Initiative was instrumental in helping Microsoft work toward both conclusions.

I’m really proud of Sam, Robert Duffner, and the others at Microsoft who made this happen. Given Microsoft’s importance to the software community, this OSP commitment shouldn’t be understated.

And over at GrokLaw Pamela Jones had the following to say;

This is a major change. I haven’t had time to figure out if there are any gotchas. None leap off the page. OOXML is under the OSP. And Sam Ramji has announced also that Microsoft has become a sponsor of the Apache Foundation. And they took the money. Andy Oliver confirms. Are pigs flying, or what?

Well, OK, that isn’t exactly “extremely positive”, but for a GrokLaw comment about something Microsoft is doing to you have to agree it is pretty positive!

I’m still a believer.

Assuming you have not spend the last two weeks living in a sealed box under a bridge (or in a hotel in Portland with an almost non existent internet connection) then you will probably have noticed that the journalist behind the Fake Steve blog has started writing again, this time under his real name Dan Lyons.

Either that or in an extremely confusing twist the real Steve Jobs is now blogging as Fake Dan.

Check out his new blog here.

So far it has been a pretty educational week for me here at OSCON in Portland, it has been great to meet new people as well as an opportunity to catch up with old friends.

As I mentioned in an earlier post the week started for me with Participate08, an open discussion about several aspects of the open source industry as it exists today. The discussion covered several dimensions including hybrid business models, community inclusion, motivations for involvement and a discussion around intellectual property.

The conversation itself has been well documented by others, here is an example from Phil Robb and another from Zack Urlocker, so I won’t go into any depth around that. A quick web search will find you a few more along with a diverse set of personal opinions on the day.

What I would like to do is think a little about a single statement that was made by one of the panelists during the afternoon conversation.

The discussion turned to Microsoft’s relationship with OSS community, touching on our evolving strategy to increase our general level of involvement with the community. As might be expected a couple of predictable comments were then made about past statements made by various people from Microsoft about Open Source.

One of the panelists then talked a little about what it takes to bring a new member into a community project and some of the phases that a lot of organizations go through as they learn how to work with the wider open source community. They talked about a common pattern of kicking new members for a little while, then eventually moving on into a mode of teaching the new member more about the community and the most effective way to participate.

I’ve talked in the past about the growing number of employees within the company who are starting to recognize the opportunity that the open source world presents for Microsoft, and I think the statement made by the panelist applies well to those folks.

Speaking from a personal point of view I’m keen to learn, indeed that is exactly why I’m here in Portland this week and it’s why I have worked hard on some of the relationships I have with OSS leaders in Asia.

The kicking is pretty unproductive, the teaching and learning has a lot more potential…

I’ve been attending Microsoft’s annual global sales meeting in Atlanta this week and find myself in a painful situation where I now have only a week before I need to be in Redmond for several other meetings, including the DII Workshop on SP2 and ODF.

My colleague Bryan Kirschner, Microsoft’s Director of Platform Community Strategy, has managed to talk me into using the week by spending it at OSCON in Portland, including taking part in an event on Monday by the name of Participate08. It didn’t take much, he suggested it, I jumped at the opportunity!

Brian has a post up about Participate08 which contains several links for anybody who wants to find out more about the day.

The reasons I think it is cool are mostly personal as well as professional. The work of Harvard’s Karim Lakhani (our facilitator in the morning and moderator in the afternoon) has been one of the biggest influences on my perspective on free and open source software (…that’s kind of a pun…). I haven’t been familiar with panelist Siobhan O’Mahony’s work quite as long, but she is one of, if not “the” leading researcher on how firms work with open source communities. Her work quite literally helps me figure out how to do my job. Panelist John Wilbanks runs the Science Commons project at Creative Commons, an endeavor I think has a good solid foundation in elements of brilliance. Speaking of which, Zack Urlocker is a super smart guy. And Allison Randal has her own standing tagline with me as “one of the most thoughtful people in FOSS.”

In all it should provide for a interesting set of conversations, and for me personally a great opportunity to learn more more about community participation. The panel looks excellent, and I’m looking forward to hearing what everybody has to say…

I would also love to meet any of my readers who are there next week, especially if you are working out of the Asia Pacific region. Jump to the contact page and flick me a mail.

As a long term employee of Microsoft you start to notice that several of the arguments involving the company are a little cyclic, they come and go but rarely seem to evolve all that much.

One bell that seems to toll every three of four years involves somebody declaring the death of the PC as we know it, an argument that is generally followed a few months later by a cry of “Long Live the PC”.

This document appeared in my inbox recently, it is written by one of our Principal Technology Specialists based in Brisbane, Geoff Clark. He does an excellent job of summarizing areas where we’re seeing innovation around the PC platform. The document discusses several ways in which the PC has been evolving over the last couple of years, and how we might expect it to evolve in the next couple.

The document itself was written just a little over a year ago, if it was updated today there would be room for additional topics such as the netbook, the role of the PC in robotics and surface computing. In an industry that occasionally feels a little stagnant it is useful to take a step back and look at what is really happening around us.

The document concludes;

Computing processing power, storage capacity and network bandwidth continue to grow at an amazing rate. Some of this growth is being used to drive server-based services, such as core business processes, either within the local data centre or delivered as “software as a service” over the internet. The impact of this growth is increasingly being felt at the edge of the network where we see increasingly productive user-focused computing, such as computer/human interaction and mentor-based functions. By moving these functions to the network edge in the form of the PC, the following advantages are realized:

- Your services can move closer to your customer
- Data entry accuracy is increased – and in many cases, data is entered by your customer
- The interaction with services and business processes become much more engaging and more easily understood

Whatever form factor the PC takes – from desktop, to laptop, tablet or “ultra mobile”, we will see it become even more powerful and in turn even more valued in the organisation of the future. It will be a personal mentor for guiding users through their day, helping them automatically deal with the routine, understand the relevant and enable them to magnify their effectiveness in the organisation.

Geoff has recently started blogging, if you’re interested in reading more of his thoughts you’ll find them here.

I have a question that one of my readers might be able to answer, nothing whatsoever to do with technology or technology policy, just something that I have been curious about for a while.

I’ve been traveling to the USA on a pretty regular basis since the late 1980s and apart from the eight years I lived in the Seattle area the entry process has always been pretty much the same for me, entering under the eternally simple I-94(W) visa wavier program. Basically filling out a simple green form as I depart as apposed to having to go through a complex visa application process as I still have to for many other countries.

This months issue of KrisFlyer magazine talks about the process being simplified further with the introduction of an online process that the US Dept of Homeland Security will make live on an optional basis on the 1st August this year and mandatory on the 1st January next year, filling out an online form that will provide US multiple entry for a two year period - if I understood the article correctly then the I-94(W) will be replaced by this new online process.

According to the KrisFlyer article, on the 1st August the URL for the new service will be https://esta.cbp.dhs.gov.

Before it disappears altogether there is something I have always wondered about the back of the I-94(W) form.

All entrants using the visa waiver program are asked to answer the following set of simple yes or no questions;

Do you have a communicable disease; physical or mental disorder; or are you a drug abuser or addict?

Have your ever been arrested or convicted of a crime involving moral turpitude or a violation related to a controlled substance; or been arrested or convicted for two or more offenses for which the aggregate sentence to the confinement was five years or more; or been a controlled substance trafficker; or are you seeking entry to engage in criminal or immoral activities?

Have you ever been or are you now involved in espionage or sabotage; or in terrorist activities; or genocide; or between 1933 and 1945 were involved, in any way, in persecutions associated with Nazi Germany or its allies?

Are you seeking to work in the U.S.; or have ever been excluded or deported; or been previously removed from the United States; or procured or attempted to procure a visa into the U.S. by fraud or misrepresentation?

Have you ever detained, retained or withheld custody of a child from a U.S. citizen granted custody of the child?

Have you ever been denied a U.S. visa or entry into the U.S. or had a U.S. visa canceled?

These types of question are not unique to the United States, you find similar questions on the various entry cards around the world, so apologies for picking on just one countries process here, it is just timely given that this particular one might soon disappear.

For years I have been ticking all the “No” boxes (because they are the correct answers!) and wondering quite what the goal is of asking these questions.

I’m no lawyer so I can only hypothesize about why these questions get asked, and what the process hopes to gain by asking them.

In our younger years myself and my traveling companions joked about how these questions might trick the habitually honest thug into declaring their hand at the border, obviously an unrealistic expectation.

In recent years I have wondered if being dishonest on this form gives the Federal Government some level of legal recourse that they would not have otherwise.

In reality I suspect that these questions are there simply to prompt the applicant to go and talk to their local U.S. embassy before getting on a plane if they have to answer yes to any of the questions, answering yes to any of these questions probably disqualifies you from entering under the visa waiver program.

Is anybody able to clarify what purpose these questions really serve?

A quick mention.

Doug Mahugh is outlining a workshop that will be held on Microsoft’s Campus in Redmond on July 30th, principally looking at some of the document format interoperability work that will be going into Microsoft Office SP2.

We’re holding a workshop in Redmond on July 30 to talk about our ODF support in Office 2007 SP2. This is a free workshop that we’re doing as part of our Document Interoperability Initiative, to share information with the developer community and solicit feedback on how we can work together to improve interoperability.

We initially invited the members of the ODF TC, but it looks like we may have a few more slots open, so I thought I’d extend the invitation more broadly. I can’t guarantee that we’ll have room for everyone who would like to attend, but please let me know if you’re interested and I’ll see if we can get you in. Priority will be given to those who are working with the ODF format, including developers who are implementing ODF, organizations that are using ODF, and persons who are contributing to the evolution and maintenance of the ODF standard.

He has his email address included in the post, contact him if you are wanting to attend.

For anybody based here in Asia I’m aware that it is a long trip, but I’m hoping that there will be some participation from the region. The workshop is the week after OSCON in Portland, so there is a chance that there will be some folks who are already planning on making the trip to the Pacific Northwest around this time.