Category: Openization

Friday’s open standards conference in the Danish Parliament was a big success, we all agreed. A full house of participants, a range of good presentations, and good deliberations and debates. Throughout the day, open standards were promoted, by policy makers, vendors and, well, everyone. As Morten Kjærsgaard from OSL concluded in closing the conference, it is not a question of open standards or not, but rather about how and when.

In his opening talk, Morten Helveg Petersen MP announced a consultation draft of a motion in Parliament about the use of open standards in Danish government. By blogging the draft text, and opening up for comments, Helveg has openized the policy making process in a web 2.0 way. In this spirit, it seems appropriate to label his initiative B64 2.0, but actually it’s an appropriate name because it basically is a reintroduction of his own motion B64 from last session of Parliament. The motion’s draft text in my draft translation goes like this:

Parliament imposes on the government a duty to ensure that the public sector’s use of IT, including use of software, is based on open standards.

The state should adopt and maintain a set of open standards by 1 January 2008 which can serve as an inspiration for the rest of the public sector. Open standards should be part of public IT and software procurement with the object of promoting competition.

The state should ensure that all digital information and data that the public sector exchanges with citizens, companies and institutions, are available in open standards based formats.

I encourage all bloggers, and everybody else, to post comments to Morten’s blog on this important issue. If you post a copy of your comments here, I’ll provide an XML-feed of comments, as an inspiration to Morten, and a convenient way to keep track of comments.

Tags: B64 2.0, B64, open standards

Jeff Kaplan is in Copenhagen this week, as one of the international keynote speakers at our open standards conference on Friday. We’ve had to close for registrations due to seat restrictions in Parliament, so I hope you have already registred if you wanted to join us.

If you want to meet Jeff and also Susan Struble from Sun Microsystems, we’ll have an informal meeting here Thursday from 17-19. Just come to the IT-University, aud 2.

We have announced a Danish Conference on Open Standards to be held at Christianborg, the Danish Parliament, on 13 January 2006.

We’ll have two international keynotes: Jeff Kaplan will present the roadmap, and Susy Struble from Sun will talk about current standardization issues in an international perspective, including ODF.

There is good political interest in the conference, and all parties in Parliament will participate in a roadtable debate at the end of what promises to become a very interesting day.

In Roadmap for Open ICT Ecosystems, we wrote: We welcome your ideas, best practices and case studies, which will keep this roadmap a vital, living tool. I have created a wikified version of the roadmap for OeG members and others to continue working on the roadmap to make it a vital, living tool. By extending it, elaborating on it, commenting on it, and whatnot. The wiki also contains updates info about translations and roadshows, and is already quite active.

OeG Founder Jeff Kaplan has also started a blog. Subscribed. I like the tag line: Carpe apertio (Seize openness).

I introduced the roadmap in Danish in PÃ¥ vej mod Ã¥bne it-økosystemer – eller: Openization!, in the November issue of Prosit, a newsletter to students, published by Prosa, the Danish Association of Computer Professionals.

I have another article (in Danish), Kommunalreformens it-udfordringer (PDF-version) in Prosabladet, a monthly journal published by Prosa. That article is about the IT challenges in the municipal reform, and the need for architectural work.

I am running an experiment. This is how my desktop looks:

As this illustrates, I am trying to run only open source (and free) products on Windows XP. I use OpenOffice for my office documents, Firefox (1.5 is out now!) as my browser, Thunderbird as my email client, and Sunbird as my calendar.

I don’t miss Word, PowerPoint and Outlook the least. The MS Office install-CD sits in the CD-tray, but I have not once felt a need or urge to install it.

Bob Sutor gave an excellent public lecture tonight here in Copenhagen. Even though it was announced just two days ago, around 80 showed up!

Bob gave a preview of his Finnish keynote, and then gave an update on the ODF situation in Massachusetts and elsewhere (Armonk, for example). If you follow Bob’s blog and all the other blog/news coverage, you’ll know that industry support for ODF is increasing, and some new initiatives can be expected which will further consolidate ODF as a mature, open standard for office documents.
Problems of a more technical nature will be solved (through OASIS), and although I didn’t hear Bob say so directly, I somehow got the impression that this “coalition” or “Open Format Freedom Fighters Forum” (Peter Quinn) silently (or loudly?) has said, “Hmm, OK, fuck them, we’ll take them on their own turf now”. Or, “Is this a competitive move? Absolutely,” as Stephen O’Grady is reported to comment last week.

Whatever the outcome of the Massachusetts case will be, there is no doubt that ODF is “for real” and that we can now start talking about competition in the office document format area.

So, basically, it is a “standards war” between two sides – ODF and Microsoft – but it’s too early to declare victory. ODF is central to IBM Workplace (where XForms has also become central, btw). And of course, ODF is central to Sun StarOffice as well as the open source office package OpenOffice 2.0 and several others, and Corel WordPerfect. David Berlind says “Microsoft will have little choice but to support it or turn its own MSXML-based file formats over to some sort of standards body or multi-party stewarded consortium”.

Microsoft now has to come up with something really clever to win this war. On the other hand, they have been around in this business for a long time (several years ahead in actual use of XML in office), and might have more up their sleves than support for PDF, which seems somewhat odd considering their Metro efforts, which I assume they still work on. So, embracing PDF is probably “just” a response to “user requirements”, not a strategic move as such.

Whatever moves we’ll see over the coming months and years, it is interesting to look at the larger picture:
– XML won the office war by near-total annihilation of non-XML formats. Implementations of XML differ, but it’s all XML. That’s worth declaring as victory, for all. Peace.
– (did Zip also win the war? for ODF yes, but not sure where MS stands)
– the politics of standards is evolving, at least in the US. It’s almost hitting main street politics, and has hit the mass media. I guess that’s basically a good thing, although it also has costs and consequences in general.

So, where is Denmark in all this? Well, in order to “warm up” my students before Bob came and we opened the doors to others, I had invited Danish MP, Morten Helveg Petersen, from the Social Liberals, to come and give his view on things. Morten has been driving the “IT-opposition” in parliament for several years. In 2003, he presented an open standards charter, and has been pushing for more ever since.

Morten told about his B64 Bill to Parliament, which would mandate the use of open standards in government, but which were “dropped” due to elections being called, but is being re-presented. He also told about a recent political agreement which means that a National Knowledge Centre for Software will be funded and established.

Dr Bob Sutor, IBMs Vice President of Standards and Open Source, is en route to
Open Mind 2005 in Finland to give a keynote on “Open Standards, Open Source and Communities – Backbones for Business and Innovation”, and will make a quick stop in Copenhagen.

I’ve arranged for Bob to give a public lecture on Wednesday, November 9 at 19.00. Location is the IT-University, Rued Langgaards Vej 7, 2300 København S, Room 2A12. You’re all invited to join us, for what I’m certain will be some good and interesting discussions about open standards.

Bob recently participated in Harvard’s Berkman Center’s discussion session on Open Standards and Interoperability. That discussion was meant to be an extension of the work of the Open ePolicy Group and our Roadmap in September. The discussions are worth listening to or reading. Also check Bob’s notes from the discussion.

When I read the NY Times article Balancing Linux and Microsoft about Bruce Perens and his new initiative, Sincere Choice, which is a response to the recent Initiative for Software Choice, which Microsoft sponsors, I came to think of Jack Worthing’s closing words in “The Importance of Being Earnest – A Trivial Comedy for Serious People“, Oscar Wilde’s 1895-classic:

“On the contrary, Aunt Augusta, I’ve now realised for the first time in my life the vital Importance of Being Earnest.”

Microsoft = Earnest ? Hmm.

The Initiative for Software Choice encourage governments to consider the following “neutral principles”:

• Procure software on its merits, not through categorical preferences
  
• Promote broad availability of government funded research
  
• Promote interoperability through platform-neutral standards
  
• Maintain a choice of strong intellectual property protections

The rhetoric is strong. They almost shoot themselves in the foot a couple of times, for example here: “Governments are best served when they can select software from a broad range of products based on such considerations as value, total cost of ownership, feature set, performance and security.” Exactly! So, why put up long-term licencing deals, which by nature takes away the choice?

The Global Software Choice Tracker on their site is useful, but a bit too selective.

Sincere Choice sets up parallel principles:

• Open Standards


• Choice Through Interoperability


• Competition by Merit


• Research Availability


• Range of Copyright Policies


• Freedom to Set Policy

To spot the difference, one must read what they mean. For example, they write: “Intercommunication and file formats should follow standards that are sincerely open for all to implement, without royalty fees or discrimination. […] No user should be required to use a particular product simply because other users do. Competing products should interoperate with each other through open standards.” Naturally, this would not, I assume, apply to Microsoft-policy.

Choice and exit must go hand in hand. Freedom is to be able to choose either, and to have a voice about the choice.

I have invited Bruce Perens to Copenhagen for yet another conference, we’re setting up, on 30 October. I’m still looking for someone from “the other side”, so we can get a counter-part to Perens. Any candidates?