[Noooxml] [odf-discuss] URGENT: Support threatened open standards in Europe before Sept 15, 2007

Thu Sep 20 02:05:02 EDT 2007

I suspect that the Gartner document is not going to affect major government
decisions on office document formats in the E.U. From everything I can see,
that is the PEGSCO report. <http://ec.europa.eu/idabc/en/document/3439/5585>.
Its approach was heavily reinforced and asserted at the IDABC Open Document
Exchange Workshop 2007 in Berlin on February 28-March 1 <
http://ec.europa.eu/idabc/en/document/6474>, and is heavily reflected in
European NB comments on  Ecma 376 at ISO.

The ODEF Workshop summarized future eGovernment procurement requirements for
vendors to aim at.  In summary, it's PDF for archival, a single set of
formats for editing of office documents, with the single set converged from
ODF and Ecma 376 with ODF markup providing the common functionality and no
proprietary extensions. Interoperability and compatibility with legacy
formats are also high on their list; nearly all of their requirements could
fairly be categorized as interop requirements.

The short story here is that E.U. eGov is unhappy with both ODF and Ecma
376. They want a single set of formats with no vendor lock-in. Neither ODF
nor Ecma 376 fulfill their interop requirements. Meanwhile, the OpenDocument
TC fiddles on without even  discussing the ODEF requirements and Microsoft
still pushes on for standardization of Ecma 376.

The big vendors seem to be united on at least two principles: [i] the office
productivity software market will continue to be allocated by maintenance of
interoperability barriers; and [ii] any market requirement that conflicts
with the maintenance of those interoperability barriers and the market
allocation will be ignored.

The most likely outcome at ISO, in my current opinion, is that Ecma 376 will
be substantially revised in ways that Microsoft will be unable and unwilling
to implement if it could; Microsoft will elect to rely on its market power
and existing vendor lock-in without fully supporting a standard in this
area. ODF v. 1.2 appears to be headed for substantial revision as well in
its interop aspects. Then the big ODF vendors will have to decide whether
they are willing to enable round-trip interop among ODF applications. There
is a strong possibility that international standards will become irrelevant
in this area and that the market allocation and interop barriers will
remain.

In short, all of the big vendors talk the interop talk but have yet to take
the first step in walking the interop walk. Whether and when they will
remain open questions.

I mentioned earlier that we have taken OpenDocument off our development
roadmap at least until such time as it acquires conformance requirements
that transform it to an interoperable set of formats. I also said that I
would disclose the formats we are now working with in our MS Office interop
tools. Here it is. We are implementing the W3C Compound Document Formats. <
http://www.w3.org/2004/CDF/>. Unlike ODF and Ecma 376, CDF has strict
conformance requirements that implement a strong interoperability framework
using XML profiles. That framework enables and requires less featureful and
more featureful apps to round-trip documents without data loss.

The dinosaurs of the industry can play their games. We're moving on and
working on fulfilling market requirements.

Best regards,

Marbux

On 9/19/07, Nicolas Pettiaux <nicolas.pettiaux at ael.be> wrote:
>
> 2007/9/19, Lars Noodén <lars at umich.edu>:
>
> thank you for your question Lars, and for your answer Andre. It is
> probably better than the one I would have written myself.
>
> > When I wrote it I became aware that there is virtually no "open
> standards"
> > pressure group.
>
> indeed. I plan to work on this. And this will be my main action, next
> to the Belgian case around ooxml position that I want to be flipped
> from abstention to no.
>
> In Brussels, at Belgian federal level, there is one. Active. WIth some
> people who try to be active at the IDABC level, aka formal national
> representation at some European level.
>
> With the new government that we will have (and that we have been
> expecting for 101 days now), this will change. Some of the people
> supporting open standards officially will move and leave the small
> higher decision levels, but many will remain in the administration. We
> will have to rebuild something for the next 5 years (at best)
>
> Yet, Belgian government has decided in June 2006 to make the use of
> ODF compulsory for the federal administration in 2 phases: reading by
> october 2007, reading and writing by october 2008 if feasible. I want
> to insist on this too and make enough noise in the press about this.
>
> One of the possibility or opportunity is the "contagion" (some say
> viral) effect this may have: what if sometime in the near future
> Belgian administration can and do only send and receive document in
> odf formats to their colleagues at the European and other national
> levels, and this by the virtue of some legal obligation ? These other
> ones will have to have a way to read and send such documents too, aka
> install OOo on their platforms, maybe next to Microsoft Office (what
> has been done by the way here on the 60000+ computers of the Belgian
> ministery of finance). And the worm will be in the fruit. Odf
> documents will be sent or at least sendable.
>
> > Shall we found one now?  If so, what approach should it used to ensure
> > there is a reasonable pays off in comparison to effort?
> >
> > What should the scope be, open formats, protocols, specifications and
> > standards?
>
> good question. I plan to meet with national representatives in the
> European parliament, starting with the Belgian ones. As I am located
> in Brussels, very close to this parliament and the representatives'
> offices, this will be doable. As I have the chance of owning a house,
> I can even, as I did for the software patent case, consider (and
> persuade my family) to put up the friends who would like to spend some
> time in BRussels TO meet their own representatives.
>
> > How should it interact with established groups for specific domains,
> > such as productivity documents?
>
> which ones ?
>
> > > EU open standards needs more backing.
> >
> > +1
>
> +10
>
> Regards,
>
> Nicolas
> --
> Nicolas Pettiaux - email: nicolas.pettiaux at ael.be
> Utiliser des formats ouverts et des logiciels libres -
> http://www.passeralinux.org.
> Pour la bureautique, les seuls formats ISO sont ceux de
> http://fr.openoffice.org
> _______________________________________________
> odf-discuss mailing list
> odf-discuss at opendocumentfellowship.com
> http://lists.opendocumentfellowship.org/mailman/listinfo/odf-discuss
>

-- 
BUCK "MARBUX" MARTIN
  Director of Legal Affairs
  OpenDocument Foundation
  Contact:
<http://www.opendocumentfoundation.us/contact.htm>
-- Universal Interop Now!
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.opendocumentfellowship.com/pipermail/odf-discuss/attachments/20070919/642e19d6/attachment-0001.htm