According to the following bit of information, ECMA does not exactly operate like a standards body should. Have a look (emphasis mine):
Global Graphics’ chief technology officer Martin Bailey has been appointed by standards development body Ecma International to chair a new technical committee that will work on producing a formal industry standard for the XML Paper Specification (XPS), the new print and document format introduced by Microsoft with Windows Vista….
Global Graphics has played a prominent role in the development and launch of the XPS specification from the very start. A recognized expert in interpreting, rendering and converting PDLs, Global Graphics’ leading edge expertise and engineering capability were factors in the Company being chosen by Microsoft in 2003 to provide consultation services on the XPS specification as well as develop a prototype and a print reference XPS RIP for Microsoft.
Now, can you see how approval is won at ECMA? There is not much of a chance of a proposal being rejected, is there? As we said yesterday, ISO seems to have lost its way as well. It is becoming a little assimilated to ECMA, which can be referred to as a Coin-in-the-Slot Standards Organization. Once again, Microsoft’s allies are in the committee, so there is little room for independent judgment. ECMA truly looks like a production line that passes on proposal s– however poor they may be — to the ISO, then boasting some ‘pseudo acceptance’ by an industry-for-industry consortium.
Andy Updegrove and Bob Sutor are among those who try to explain to high officials why poor Microsoft-centric standards must be rejected. You can assist resistance to OOXML adoption in MA.
Preparing such comments is time consuming, but it is also important. I took several hours to do so yesterday, and have just sent them to the ITD just now. You can to, and I hope that you will. The ITD’s comment address is standards@state.ma.us, and the deadline is next Friday. If you’re a believer in open standards, please don’t let that deadline pass without making your thoughts known.
More information can be found here. According to Newton (of Alfresco), Microsoft has just taken its battles to the United Kingdom as well. It continues its lobbying campaign with an XML du jour and a twisted definition of “open”.
With OOXML and XPS, Microsoft has chosen to not work with existing standards, but to create new ones, as they have in their recent announcement on Web3S instead of working with the rest of the industry on the Atom Publishing Protocol. In the case of OOXML, this is a logical move on Microsoft’s part, since it is an evolution of Microsoft’s XML strategy started with the Microsoft Office 2003 version and ODF will be a technology diversion from that strategy. With Microsoft controlling 90% of the office productivity tools market and OOXML being the default file format for Microsoft Office 2007, OOXML is likely to be widely-used.
The article suggests that the BBC article on digital preservation may have been nothing but a publicity stunt. There are some prior incidents where Microsoft did questionable things in the United Kingdom. It ‘faked’ support for OOXML and got slammed by the Open Source Consortium, with which I’m sort of affiliated.
The petition is an attempt to make it appear that Open XML has “pseudo-grassroots” support, argues Mark Taylor, the founder of the Open Source Consortium.
This action followed a very suspicious petition, set up by nobody but Microsoft. Keep your eyes open and see how these things develop. There’s little honesty in process.
The petition’s arguments, which are presented in the form of bulletpoints, cover some of the more obvious issues. Recall some of the — shall we say — corruption involved in getting OOXML as far as it has gone. Gross manipulation of standards body and legislation should not be tolerated, so please make yourself heard and stand up for free competition.
Here is the video “Bonnie Garcia – Enter the FUD Brigade”. The hearing revolves around legistlation that was intended to prevent Microsoft’s ‘latest and greatest’ lockin from taking over the State of California. As you may know by now, part of the Novell deal and Xandros deal puts these two companies in a position where they must support Microsoft’s lockin (OOXML) to protect Microsoft’s cash cow (and therein lies the relevance of this debate to our Web site).
The pointer to this video came from Groklaw and the accompanying comment from Pamela Jones is worth adding: “You might find this of interest, a small piece of the discussion about California AB 1668, the ODF bill. It would appear that Bonnie Garcia is reading off of notes, and in any case she clearly and admittedly has no idea what ODF is or why it’s of value, neither of which hinders her from having a strong opinion, I noticed…”
This is not the first time that a technical discussion become a political one. Microsoft relies on sending its non-technical people to lobby for lockins. They can always pretend to be clueless (maybe because they are). This shifts focus and it’s no coincidence. It’s deliberate.
To quote the text (again, unsurprisingly delivered from a Windows server):
The UK Government champions open standards and interoperability through its e Government Interoperability Framework (eGIF). Where possible the Government only uses products for interoperability that support open standards and specifications in all future IT developments.
Interoperability and open standards also support the sustainability of digital information beyond any single generation of technology. New techniques for digital preservation being developed by The National Archives require the periodic transformation of digital information to new formats as technology changes. Such transformations will be simplified by the adoption of open standards.
No single format provides a universal solution for all types of digital information, and The National Archives therefore actively monitors and evaluates a wide range of existing and emerging formats (including OpenDocument Format). A policy on digital preservation, which includes guidance on the selection of sustainable data formats based on open standards, is being formulated by The National Archives, and will help define the standards for desktop systems. The National Archives technical registry ‘PRONOM’ (new window) supports this through the provision of key information about the most widely-used formats.
In a resounding victory for Microsoft Corp., bills seeking to mandate the use of open document formats by government agencies have been defeated in five states, and only a much-watered-down version of such legislation was signed into law in a sixth state.
Remind yourselves how Microsoft positioned itself so conveniently. A lot more dirty tricks were involved. It’s rather breathtaking (just follow the link and watch a sample). If this is the company Novell partners with and defends, then what does it say about Novell?
For those who have never heard of Xandros (which will be a lot of you), it’s a commercial distribution descended from Corel’s Linux system, funded by the same VCs that funded Ximian, and derived from Debian at one point, although I don’t know how much comes from there any longer. They’ve been around a long time, although for obvious reasons I can’t believe they are very successful.
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There’s not much to do about Xandros. They aren’t a big player, this isn’t going to make them into one. We should turn away from them as was the case with Novell, but it seems a bit silly since most of us didn’t even know they existed.
Let’s begin with Bruce Perens, who points out that Dan Lyons is at it again. For those who do not know, Lyons is a Forbes journalist that has been often accused of shilling for Microsoft and SCO by attacking Richard Stallman and Groklaw, among other entities (it could be part of a larger scheme).
If you read Dan Lyon’s blog, 100% of it in recent time has been snippy comments directed to Groklaw and other Open Source entitities.
An new article at CRN pays careful attention to the Novell boycott—that which is argued to have led to community division following the controversial deal. The article goes into considerable depth as it deals with issues that justify our criticism.
Linux Advocates Act
Some members of the open source community have decided to do more than watch and wait. Bruce Perens, primary author of the GNU contract, has organized a petition urging Novell to recant the patent protection portion of the deal with Microsoft.
We the undersigned petition you to reconsider your decision of including binary drivers by default in the next Ubuntu release. We believe, as you do, that it should be as easy as possible for end users to enable extra functionality via closed software when necessary and if they so wish, but only after an explicit acknowledgement and only after being informed about the issues at stake and possible alternatives. Users can be given the option to install closed drivers/software during installation or soon after installation or when an application that may require such software is run for the first time. It is a small change, but one that will avoid dividing the community on an issue that many hold dear, without sacrificing ease of use and product appeal. We therefore encourage you to opt for easy-installation as opposed to pre-installation.
Realize, this is not an anti-bling stance, but rather a pro-GPL one. As I have stated before, I am all for 3-D desktops and wireless access, I use both, but it is an end-user decision to taint the kernel.
Let Feisty install with the open source drivers, then have a customization dialog on first boot (and also some config checkbox somewhere for later) that says there are more powerful, but proprietary, drivers available and the user can click “install now” to download and install (explaining why its not installed by default). Right next to it, put a button that sends an email to the detected hardware vendor complaining about this extra step. Then, vendors will see just how many customers it does affect and act; by Ubuntu doing it for the end user without interaction, there will be no market backlash or incentive to open up.
Maybe by the time Wacky Walloby (or whatever the next next Ubuntu will be) is being prepared, the vendors will have gotten the message and this will be irrelevant, but right now it is not the right move. Ubuntu is getting very popular, this is the time to use that install base to actively petition the hardware vendors to recognize their needs as a market, not cave-in to hardware vendors who are ignoring their customers.
Technocrat.net has an article by Bruce Perens in which he responds to some of the arguments that have been made by Novell (and others) in defense of the Microvell deal.
Two weeks ago I wrote a letter protesting Novell’s patent agreement with Microsoft and made it available for other people to sign. I expected 200-300 signatures for this rather technical matter about patents and licensing, but there are 2700 signatures as I write this, and the number keeps increasing. Many of the signers attached notes directed at Novell, filled with emotion. Obviously, the Free Software community feels very strongly about this issue. But Free Software is not the only party represented. Many of the signers identify themselves as recent Novell VARs and institutional customers who will now turn to another Linux distribution.
If you haven’t read the letter, you should do so now, as the arguments in it still stand. Since I wrote the letter, Novell and others have raised some arguments of their own, most of which are faulty. I’ll deal with them here.
Bruce goes on to shed light on the differences between the Indemnification offered by Red Hat or HP and the Patent Protection provided now by Novell, “Companies that offer indemnification don’t have a business relationship with the aggressor, just as insurance companies don’t make a contract with the local burglars to deter them from robbing certain houses.” and points out that Richard M Stallman has not "absolved" anyone that he is aware of. The article also show that while Microsoft may not themselves become a "patent troll", they could engage in the behavior by proxy.
Head over to technocrat.net for the full write-up, and if you haven’t yet, please sign Bruce’s Open Letter.
Finally, some suggest that we should not shun Novell for their actions as this would hurt the SuSE Linux distribution. This led me to quip that SuSE is the “human shield” of Novell, like the hapless civilians who are herded around some war target. If SuSE is worthy of continued existence, it will continue as Open Source software with or without Novell. The vast majority of the authors of the software in the SuSE distribution do not work for Novell – indeed, I’m one of them. And of course there are several other Linux distributions of similar or higher quality.
Send this to a friend 
