Document Wars

If there were any doubts left as to how far along Microsoft is in their efforts to create a proprietary version of the Web for Office Productivity and Business Systems, the recent SharePoint Conference should put these doubts to rest.  

excerpt:  InfoPath 2010 and InfoPath Forms Services .......
Forms capability in Office and SharePoint is maturing rapidly. With the inclusion of BCS in SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010, InfoPath becomes even more powerful as a tool for aggregating, presenting and gathering information. Why? - People are now discovering how easy it is to bind BCS entities to a SharePoint list, and then present that list data to users in a rich InfoPath form. Because InfoPath does a great job of making complex data interaction simple for end users, it is becoming a critical component of LOB solutions managed in the SharePoint environment. Surfacing InfoPath solutions via the browser, InfoPath mobile forms, through Outlook, SharePoint Workspace or other interfaces makes the rich InfoPath experience portable and flexible. People on the floor certainly responded positively; InfoPath was a smashing success. Visit the InfoPath team blog to read about some of the solutions they were previewing. Below is an excerpt from the post:

This is the report John Cody worked on.  I spent four months answering his questions but was unable to adequately explain to him the difference between an "Office Suite" and a workgroup-workflow centric "Productivity Environment".  

John insists that it's entirely possible to rip-out-and-replace the MSOffice editors with the free OpenOffice Suite without disrupting important workflows and business processes.  I explained to him what happened in Massachussetts, including the 300 page pilot study report Sam wrote.  What he needs to do i think is pay close attention to the Burton Group coverage of what is now known as the SharePoint Foundation platform;  SharePoint 2010 having totally swallowed the MSOffice 2010, leaving the venerable desktop productivity office suite as an important end user interface into information rich business systems centered on the SharePoint "Unified Productivity" platform.

The New York State "OASIS approval is good enough for us" position has considerable tension with the Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade ("ATBT") ratified by the U.S. pursuant to the Uruguay Round Agremeents Act, 19 U.S.C. 2503 and Presidential signature, and are therefore "the law of this land." Zicherman v. Korean Air Lines Co., 516 U.S. 217, 226 (1996).

Relevant ATBT provisions are Article 2.4 (member nations must use appropriate international standards where they exist or parts of them as their technical regulations; I don't see an applicable exception); and 3.1 (member nations required to take such reasonable measures as may be available to them to ensure compliance by "local government and non-governmental bodies within their territories" with the provisions of Article 2). http://www.wto.org/english/docs_e/legal_e/17-tbt_e.htm

New York State is a "local government" within the meaning of the ATBT. Likewise, a New York State decision to adopt a standard for its internal use is a technical regulation. See definition 1 in ATBT Annex 1 and the holding in regard to the term's meaning by the WTO Appellate Council in the case of EC Asbestos, http://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/dispu_e/cases_e/ds135_e.htm (para. 66-70 in the HTML version).

Given that we have two relevant international standards, ISO/IEC:26300 and ISO/IEC:29500, it would seem that legally, mere "OASIS approval is [NOT] good enough" for New York State.

Some people just don't get that the ATBT was intended to force government action to remove unnecessary obstacles to international trade (such as interoperability barriers) rather than just to rubber-stamp the status quo ante.

The Feds have the enforcement responsibility here.

Re "reference implementation," if you check this video of a Rob Weir presentation, at about 44 minutes, he states: " "ISO doesn't have the concept of a reference implementation." http://ooocon-kiberpipa.kiberpipa.org/media/index-2007.html#ODF_Interoperability_Robert_Weir

But if you check his slides from the same presentation, at slide 22 we find, "Let's work to make OpenOffice.org be the full reference implementation for ODF!" http://www.robweir.com/blog/publications/Interoperability-Barcelona.pdf

An ODF "reference implementation" controlled by a single vendor, Sun Microsystems, through its padlock on the code commit rights? Sounds like a moving interoperability target to me that a standards development organization has no control of. Not ISO. Not OASIS. The implementation tail should wag the standard dog according to Weir. Too bad New York State fell for that piece of baloney.

The ripples from the European Commission v. Microsoft decision continue to flow. The catch, of course, is that the patent rights will almost certainly be subject to the Microsoft Open Specification Promise, a weasel-worded document that actually grants no rights. http://law.bepress.com/unswwps/flrps/art71/ But someone with some clout will push that issue sooner or later.

What an amazing conversation. It's true that ODF was NOT designed to be compatible with MSOffice and the legacy binary format. That's not to say there were not considerable efforts within the OASIS Open Office XML TC (ODF) pushing for compatibility. But Sun successfully held off these efforts, insisting that ODF was not designed to be compatible with MSOffice or the MSOffice binaries.

Many asked the obvious question, "How are end users supposed to convert their information (billions of legacy "in-process" binary documents) to ODF if ODF is not designed for that conversion?" Stellent, represented by Phil Boutros, and Corel, represented by Paul Langille and Tom Magliery, were particularly obsessed with this problem. Without "compatibility", how were end users supposed to convert their documents?

Needless to say, Sun prevailed. ODF is 100% perfectly compatible with OpenOffice/StarOffice, by design. It is not compatible with the billions of "in-process" compound business documents essential to world trade, commerce and information exchange.

What a shame,
~ge~

Operational  Transforms (OT) is used by Microsoft CustomXML and Google Wave!  The original idea was first presented by Zerox Parc researchers in 1995, prior to the i4i patent.  The Jupiter System  includes the Jupiter Window Tool Kit, wich is all about OT.  XML came much later with the i4i patent for encoding XML with OT positioning.

Insert(pos, text)Delete(pos, num-of-chars)

See Google Wave API: http://www.waveprotocol.org/whitepapers/operational-transform

Credit Florian Reuter for this find!!!!! 

Interoperability through antitrust - is there a legal foundation in place capable of pulling this off?  This article is a lengthy study and comparative analysis of the legal foundation in the USA and Europe.  Microsoft is of course the target.

Excerpt: Microsoft has incorporated products, such as browsers and media players, into its operating system, behavior that again amounts to technological tying. It has also improved its server software by heightening the degree to which servers employing that software can interact. By raising the level of interaction among servers equipped with its software, Microsoft has so integrated work group servers as to enable groups of small servers to approach the capacities of mainframe computers. The European competition-law authorities see both matters as problematic. The integration of the media player has been condemned as tying; and the heightened server interaction has been faulted for failing to provide the interoperability that rival server software requires in order to participate on an equal footing with Microsoft server software in Windows work groups. Microsoft’s integration (at least in the view of the European antitrust authorities) also raises issues of essential facilities, and of the role of antitrust in achieving interoperability.

. We have now reached a moment in time in which both the American and European laws are sufficiently developed to warrant reflection and comparison. That is the task approached in this article. 

Three part study:  Part I -The European approach.  Part II-USA decisions regarding Microsoft tying.  Part III-comparison of USA and European approaches to product integration (tying).

Marbux discovered this gem, joining the argument with an insightful but disagreeing post.  I however agreed with the articles author, Jeff Cogswell, that both the judge and jury confused the XML pane feature set with metacode mapping claims in the now infamous i4i 449 patent.  If Marbux is right, then HTML-CSS, ODF, and RDF/XML-RDFa are also infringing on this patent.  Which i4i claims is not the case.

Except: Here's one part of the ruling:  ... 
Microsoft Corporation is hereby permanently enjoined from ... selling, offering to sell ... any Infringing and Future Word Products that have the capability of opening a .XML, .DOCX, or .DOCM file ("an XML file") containing custom XML.

The odd wording here is "custom XML," which appears several times in the ruling. Based on the comments in response to eWEEK's articles on the ruling, as well as comments I've seen elsewhere, a great deal of people think the problem was that Microsoft uses XML as its format. But that isn't the case. The ruling focuses on the use of custom XML. The ruling is not about the fact that Word uses XML. If it did, there would be a worldwide disaster, considering how prevalent XML is.

But what exactly is custom XML? To start with, let's look at the claims of the patent itself and try to make a connection. The patent, which was written back in 1994, covers a new way of providing formatting in a word processing program. To understand the claims of the patent, it's important to note the distinction between what the inventors call content and what are called metacodes (which are ultimately formatting codes).

Maybe the most informative article to date regarding the Microsoft-i4i "custom XML" patent infringement case.  Greg Keizer is trying to dig into the trial records and judicial response.  Looks like for Microsoft, it's business as usual.

excerpt: Microsoft knew of the patent held by i4i as early as 2001, but instead set out to make the Canadian developer's software "obsolete" by adding a feature to Word, according to court documents.

Official Statement from the OpenDocument Foundation to OASIS