From OSS to ODF



Earlier, I wrote on the Massachusetts decision to insist on the OpenDocument Format (ODF) for government files. The political ramifications of this decision are revolutionary and are still being evaluated. But let's put it this way: the logic and rhetoric of promoting ODF is far stronger than that of OSS. OpenDocument, which makes no claim about open source--about production and distribution--nevertheless makes strong claims about democracy: it does not privilege a proprietary format but leaves open the application to be used to read the files, and any application which chooses can read it. In a single and amazingly powerful blow Massachusetts has effected a sea change in rhetoric and strategy, for now closed and open source companies can collaborate in promoting the file format which they use. (For an interesting account of the issue, see ZDNET's article on Tim Bray's keynote at OOoCon 2005.)

But what then about the claims and promises of FOSS? You know, the ones that argued that it would bridge the digital divide, or otherwise change the world for the better by making things not only better but faster, too, and not only that, but enable consumers to finally become producers, merely by participating in the technology with a human face that characterises FOSS?

All that is true, still true.

ODF just focuses the logic in a way that OSS could not. OSS is ultimately abstract and has to do with production strategies. ODF is simple: it's about democracy, when used by governments, and more generally about resisting the chaos of privatised formats.

But, okay, one might say, Microsoft claims that its latest format, the one for Office 12, is also an open format. How is that different from the OASIS international standard OpenDocument? I mean, if developers can see what is making up the file format, then what's the diff?

The difference is that, as with "shared source," MS's open format only gives people the right to peek, not to tweak. An open standard, like open source, gives one that right. Furthermore, the OASIS standard, because it is open to all, will logically last longer; and changes made to it will necessarily have to be gradual and inclusive, else many customers and users will be lost.

Interestingly, Stephen McGibbon, the game spokesperson for Microsoft who bizarrely, if totally entertainingly, came to Koper to rather belligerently argue the MS line (hint to Ballmer: cool it), also argued, when I asked him why MS didn't join the Technical Committee for office productivity suites as an active participant and use the ODF, that MS needed to preserve backward compatibility; joining the board and using the ODF would evidently jeopardise that.

I don't agree, of course. MS could include filters and even make the format default while allowing the application to read/write older docs. That's that OOo, does, after all: it can read and write to formats that MS O barely supports. So, if we can do it, they can, too.

More to the point, I think, the ODF, which specifies a great deal, threatens MS O by unsettling its claim to uniquity. Yes, MS O will still be what it is, but if it must hew to international standards--and it does not have a very good track record of doing so--then that which makes it itself will, in a paranoid sort of way, no longer be in its own hands. It's sort of a wildly right-wing moment, here on MS' part, where FOSS and open standards are somehow aligned with anti-Americanism, black helicopters from the UN, and other paranoid fantasies of the horror of otherness. Of course I'm exaggerating: this is a blog.

But I'm not exaggerating that much. International standards are all about working with others to agree on a set of specifications that bring people together. That logic works in a way with FOSS, too. But not with MS.

Posted: Sat - October 1, 2005 at 07:02 PM          

©