[odf-discuss] Response to Andy Updegrove's article about the Foundation

Thu Feb 7 02:33:03 EST 2008

You see, I still don't get it. What's not to interoperate with an
openly published specification? Under multiple vendor control? What is
more open and interoperable? Convince me.

In the meantime, OOXML is far worse in every respect; incomplete,
inaccurate, full of cruft; the sole vendor behind it makes the IBM of
the 80s look like a kindly old grandfather. Can we not just focus on
stopping that one before we try and develop the next one?

Chris

On 07/02/2008, marbux <marbux at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >
> >
> >
> > Hi Marbux
> >
> > May I ask, who/what is the "Universal Interoperability Council" ?
> >
> > There is no information available on your newly-created web site other
> > than the - to date - two articles posted there.
> >
> >
> Hi, Kevin.
>
> I'm sorry the site is so fresh that I still have an awful lot of site
> configuration and basic content work to do, such as an About page, although
> if you do a whois search, you'll learn that Gary Edwards' wife was kind
> enough to handle the domain name registration for me. A large realtor's
> organization is providing free hosting and bandwidth as their contribution
> to better interoperability in the future.
>
> At this point, the Council is only me. The aim though is to build a
> community around principles of universal interoperability and when younger
> leadership emerges, to hand off the reins to younger blood. They can decide
> whether to keep the Council as an ad hoc organization or to set up a formal
> institution. For now, it will be ad hoc.
>
> The analogy I've used in previous public interest leadership initiatives is
> that the task of leaders is to keep rolling snowballs down the mountain, not
> to chase each one to the bottom. If the snowball is a good one and
> well-placed, it will roll to the bottom by itself, turning into an avalanche
> in the process. If it isn't a good one or your aim is off, there's no way
> you can push it to the bottom because it becomes too big to push.
>
> So the Council is my latest snowball. The goal is to get past the deliberate
> disinformation being spread by big vendors, like the myth that "open" and
> "interoperable" are synonyms. I'm aiming for a resource center for folks
> working on interoperability issues, a reference center for interoperability
> methodology, law, policy, and other related fields.
>
> One major focus will be comparison of standards against relatively objective
> interoperability criteria provided by international and national law and by
> authoritative governing documents such as the JTC-1 Directives. See e.g.,
> http://www.jtc1sc34.org/repository/0856rev.pdf, pp. 11,
> 145.
>
> I have approximately 300 pages of referenced content mostly ready for adding
> to the site of the kind mentioned above, including an extensive referenced
> and linked glossary of relevant terms, but am trying to keep the content
> minimal until I get a few Drupal extensions working right, such as the clean
> URLs feature, the footnoting feature, and the wiki linking feature. I also
> need to get the site content's structure defined. So blog only for now.
> Otherwise, I'll wind up with a mess of broken internal links to fix.
>
> But I will try to get an About page done soon. It will probably include this
> quote that the U.S. Supreme Court borrowed for its landmark Endangered
> Species Act decision in TVA v. Hill:
>
>
>
>  "The law, Roper, the law. I know what's legal, not what's right. And I'll
> stick to what's legal. . . . I'm not God. The currents and eddies of right
> and wrong, which you find such plain-sailing, I can't navigate, I'm no
> voyager. But in the thickets of the law, oh there I'm a forester. . . . What
> would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil? . . .
> And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you - where
> would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? . . . This country's planted
> thick with laws from coast to coast - Man's laws, not God's - and if you cut
> them down . . . d'you really think you could stand upright in the winds that
> would blow the[n]? . . . Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own
> safety's sake." R. Bolt, A Man for All Seasons, Act I, p. 147 (Three Plays,
> Heinemann ed. 1967).
>
> <http://laws.findlaw.com/us/437/153.html>One way of looking
> at my goals for the site and the Council is from an environmental viewpoint.
> Cyberspace is overdue for an environmental impact statement that studies
> toxic pollution by incompatible data formats and communications protocols
> and develops alternative methods for removing the pollutants from
> cyberspace. So the Council might be viewed as the group developing the
> environmental impact statement and its set of alternative methods in a
> "living document" manner on the web site.
>
> In sum, my aim is universal interoperability. It might be utopian, but the
> work isn't done until society gets there. Along the way, I hope the site
> sparks a community that demystifies interoperability issues for a broader
> segment of the public.  E.g., you'd be shocked to learn how many developers
> who should know better have been taken in by the myth that conflates "open"
> and "interoperable."
>
> I can only regret that Pam Jones has chosen to propagate the same myth.
> Despite the enormous good she has accomplished, she is pushing the wrong
> goal in her continued advocacy for ODF and refusal to push for its repair.
> Interoperability is a threshold requirement in a networked world and ODF
> lacks the bare essentials for standards-based interoperability, as does
> OOXML.
>
> I am now horrified that I fell for the same myth when I first got involved
> with ODF. I should have known better, both because my legal career was
> devoted to toilet-training multinational corporations whose staff will say
> just about anything if it protects a profit center and because in my prior
> career as a typographer, I worked exensively with markup languages including
> the original handwritten markup language. (It might surprise you to learn
> that the first binary markup language that controlled presentation aspects
> of a document was introduced in 1928, the 6-bit telegraphy teletypesetter
> ("TTS") code created at the behest of major newspaper publishers and The
> Associated Press.) I can still read TTS. See
> <http://www.gochipmunk.com/html/teletypeperf3.html>. I
> should have dug into the spec before endorsing ODF. Now I need to make
> amends for helping to lead so many people astray.
>
> My goal is to promote broader understanding of the realities of
> standards-based interoperability that goes far deeper than the the public
> relations myths that now dominate the File Format War debate on both sides.
> In other words, I intend to authoritatively inject a large dose of reality
> into the debate.
>
> Of course my interoperability advocacy while participating on the ODF TC --
> and later in blowing the whistle on what was happening there -- was not to
> be tolerated by IBM, the last big vendor left standing in the ODF camp. So
> Bob Sutor put out the hit order on Gary Edwards and me, resulting in Rob
> Weir's personal attack. Andy Updegrove and Pam Jones piled on.
>
> But one of the things I learned in the practice of law was not to fall for
> sucker punches. I've used the intervening time to get my ducks lined up and
> my brief developed. I think there are going to be a lot of independent FOSS
> folk who will be as displeased as I am once convinced that IBM and Sun
> walked FOSS out to the end of the ODF gangplank with a deliberate
> disinformation campaign built around the myth of ODF interoperability.
>
> The Universal Interoperability Council, during my period of leadership, will
> have no affinity with or favoritism for any software vendor. Standards and
> their strong and weak points will be evaluated frankly and with reliance on
> objective criteria.
>
> With hosting and bandwidth paid for by an organization whose membership's
> only interest in software is as users, this is a project that can run on a
> shoestring and be a principled voice in the file format debate, which is not
> going to end despite the final vote tally next month at JTC 1.
>
> I hope this gives you a sufficient overview but don't hesitate to ask other
> questions. (The About page will hopefully be more compressed.) The Council
> is going to be every bit as open as I can make it given the limitations of
> software, time, and my abilities.
>
> Best regards,
>
> Paul Merrell ("Marbux")
>
>
>
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>
>
>

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