Document Wars

Standardisation is one of the key facilitators for interoperability of networks, services and equipment. Interoperability in this sense has gained increasing attention and demand inthe market-place. Thus, in response to market-driven needs interoperability is becomingan important requirement in standards projects.This white paper examines the standards development process as well as the actors involved and proposes a set of recommendations in standards development that will help to address interoperability challenges that may occur and can be observed instandardisation. At the same time it provides an agreed industry position on key aspects for standards development. Observing these recommendations - as is done by a lot of actors in standardisation already, including formally established standards setting bodies - may help to increase the level of interoperability in standardisation. This white paper aims at strengthening the awareness to observe interoperability issues at an early stage and make those issues an important consideration as part of the standards-setting process. EICTA's recommendations for the standards development process:

Another good article form Michael Hickins, this time linking the success of Google Wave to the success of Microsoft OOXML. Rob Weir jumps in to defend , well, i'm not sure. I did however respond. Excerpt: Developers hoping to hitch a ride on Google's Wave have discovered that Microsoft may have unwittingly helped them resolve the single greatest problem they needed to overcome in order to challenge the dominance of Office. When Microsoft set out to create Office 2007 using a brand new code base - Office Open XML (OOXML) - it needed to accomplish two goals: make it compatible with all previous versions of Office, and have it accepted as a standard file format for productivity tools so that governments could continue using it while complying with rules forcing them to use standards-based software. ..... Depending on your perspective, either Microsoft has sowed the seeds of its own undoing, or international standards bodies succeeded in forcing Microsoft to open itself up. Either way, Microsoft has given away the key to compatibility with Office documents, allowing all comers to overcome the one barrier that has heretofore prevented customers from dumping Microsoft's Office suite.

Glynn Moody, who is quoted in the article, obviously does not understand what was involved in Massachusetts. Sam Hiser, also quoted, was deeply and personally involved. OOXML wasn't even on the horizon then. Microsoft Office 2003 wrote to a flat XML format that was irrelevant in any event. What Massachusetts wanted --- and deserved from the ODF community --- was an ability to integrate OpenOffice.org with business processes that were already thoroughly bound to Microsoft Office. The problem was in fact solved by the OpenDocument Foundation's ODF plug-ins for Microsoft Office, but the project had to be ditched because Sun would neither adapt OOo nor allow ODF to be adapted for the purpose. Gary Edwards and I wrote an in-depth and heavily-referenced article on why ODF failed in Massachusetts. http://www.linuxworld.com/news/2007/072307-opendocuments-grounded.html (.) Those who do not comprehend that integration of data created by end point solutions and stored in legacy data silos is a fundamental requirement in service oriented architectures will never comprehend why interoperability is so vitally important. They wind up being unwitting advocates of incredibly expensive rip out and replace solutions. Good luck, particularly in the current economic climate. The wonderment is why anyone believes that Microsoft Office can be toppled by ODF from its monopoly position without ultra-high fidelity interoperability with Microsoft Office. Too much "what works well enough for me works well enough for anyone" mindset, I suspect.

This article compliments the previous publication, "The better Office Alternative - Softmaker Office". Good stuff! Excerpt: "It's the question that vexes free open source software advocates and commercial competitors around the globe: Why is Microsoft Office so difficult to dislodge from its perch atop the IT heap? Is it the exclusive bundling deals? The deep Software Assurance entrenchment? Steve Ballmer's backroom deal with the devil?" "The answer, of course, is none of the above (though some evidence of a Microsoft-Hell alliance exists). Rather, it's the Office ecosystem -- the vast library of third-party add-ons and vertical solutions built (with copious encouragement from Microsoft) on Office's extensive programmatic model -- that makes Microsoft's suite so hard to kill."

What Web business systems really need are advanced desktop editors capable of producing business process rich compound documents in the language of the Web: HTML5/CSS3/JavaScript........

An honest misunderstanding? Hardly! Play the tape! ... A response to David Berlind relating to false claims made by IBM and the W3C regarding direct correspondence concerning CDF being used as an interchange format. Instead of arguing about who said what when, let's just go to the record and see exactly what the W3C's Doug Schepers said to us in an eMail introducing himself. Keep in mind that we did not contact the W3C or Mr. Schepers. The following eMail was most welcome, but entirely unsolicited.

Official statement from the OpenDocument Foundation on leaving OASIS

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