The Responsibility of Governments? Open Standards, Open Source,
OpenOffice.org
Louis
Suárez-Potts
Chair, OpenOffice.org
Community Council
Community
Manager
The
Responsibility of Governments? Open Standards, Open Source, and
OpenOffice.org
I.
From Inked Paper to Electronic
Media
Paper and ink documents do
not require any special technology to read or write. This is so obvious I have
to say it. You do not need a special reader, computer, or other mediating
device. To write your thoughts on paper a simple stick saturated with ink is
enough, provided you can make intelligible marks; to read it, you need nothing
at all, just the ability to decode the marks. You need, in short, only
education. What is more, the document is yours to do as you like and is not
dependent on the company that made the paper or ink; it won't become illegible
if the company who made the ink or the paper decides to change its product. The
longevity of the document depends of course on the robustness of the ink and
paper and, most importantly, on the ability of people to read the language.
Since the modern period—since
the rise of the public sphere and other public modes of exchange and investment
and governance—it has been the historical responsibility of government to
teach its citizens to read and write. Why? It's almost absurd to ask. But if a
people cannot read and write, then a nation's wealth is imperilled: no business,
no history, no public sphere, no future. And it has been a characteristic of
modern states to ensure the health and wealth of a
nation.
Switch now to the present and
to the modern usage of electronic media. What happens to the paper? To the ink?
These are seldom used now, except for legacy bureaucratic forms or as a
supplement to electronic documents (print outs) or for nostalgic reasons. The
trend, which has only been accelerating, is to produce purely electronic
documents and to save them in huge electronic archives. Paper documents, which
recorded so much of our past so easily and which anyone with training could
produce (no special technology required), are already a thing of the past. They
linger on out of habit.
South Korea is
leading the world in moving toward a connected world and in embracing the
future. Broadband and modern mobility is, I understand, pervasive here, and its
ubiquity is changing not only how people work and communicate with each other
but how the public sector relates to its people. Documents and information that
previously were only available on paper or via telephone can now be downloaded
and passed along in seconds. The result? More documents (goes without saying),
more collaboration, and more access: Documents can now be made more available to
those who need or want them.
What are
the full implications of this sea change in how we communicate? Clearly, we are
still discovering what bargains we have made for this ease, what our options
are. This flexibility, this ease, we are learning, comes at a price.
II. The Bargains We
Made
That price is measure in more
than dollars but even in dollars it is very high. We all like the ability to
bypass the clumsiness of typewriters and other ink/paper technology, and we like
the collaborational potential offered by electronic media; we have come to
accept the cost of productivity suites as part of the price of modern life. But
in welcoming this new ease of doing things we have also implicitly made a
Faustian bargain with proprietary systems that threaten to take us away from the
powerful forces motivating the current economic and public sphere
growth.
Unlike ink/paper technology,
which anyone can use and which can preserve thoughts for millennia, the
documents we create today not only require us to use technology that is neither
open nor free (like ink/paper writing) but proprietary: it's owned by someone,
in this case, most often Microsoft. It's as if a language were created that you
had to pay to learn and then all the important texts were written in it. Only
those who paid could write and read the texts.
An analogy: It is as if we had entered
the European feudal age, when a version of this was in fact the case. The
language for official communication was Latin, not what people spoke, and
learning Latin cost a lot, so that only a very few families in this Cathedral
culture could wield official power. With the Renaissance, the people's language
(what they actually spoke, especially at the marketplace) was used and culture,
commerce, flourished; what counted as the public sphere grew--and has continued
to grow.
The threat against public
culture is the use of technologies of writing and reading that effectively
exclude all but the privileged public—a return to the Feudal age and
something we do not want.
The
still-dominant seller of technology that is predicated on exclusion is
Microsoft. Microsoft is of course only interested in profits and in retaining
its hold on the market; that's true of any monopoly. Innovation from without
represents a threat to their market hegemony. They need to satisfy their
shareholders not philosophical or moral or ethical or national concerns, except
as they affect their profits and markets and ultimately shareholders.
I
should underscore that this is not a rant against Microsoft—that would be
easy and also a little predictable. Rather, the point of my presentation is to
dramatize the situation we find ourselves in now and to offer a strong solution.
The situation, as I have suggested, is
one in which the documents we produce are effectively owned by proprietary
companies, chiefly Microsoft, using proprietary technologies. The problem with
this situation, which has quietly, with almost no political discussion crept up
upon the world, is that it returns the world to a quasi-feudal system where a
nation's documents are available only to those who own an expensive technology
owned by a company thousands of miles away and beholden to shareholders who do
not care about Korea's own interests, except insofar as it helps the company's
bottom line. What is more, Microsoft has made it so that if one wants the
collaboration features promoted one must buy into the entire stack: buy
Microsoft and Microsoft buys
you.
III.The
Solution Is Open
The solution is
to use open standards and open source. This is a solution that is political,
technological, and commercial, and it is one that South Korea is taking boldly
and strongly. South Korea is leading the world here. Moving to open source and
open standards—Linux is just a start--is very important because it
promotes an open and free market while lowering costs, and, equally, if not more
important, returns the production and consumption of documents to the state
where writing and reading them depends only one's ability to read and write, not
pay for proprietary systems.
Why are
open standards important? Open standards are, "publicly available and
implementable" standards (Wikipedia). Any compliant application can use an open
standard, whether it be proprietary or open source, so in purely pragmatic
terms, the real test of an open standard is not which organization—OASIS,
ISO, ECMA—has approved it but which applications are using it. In this
test, Microsoft's proposed standard, Open XML, fails miserably and the OASIS
OpenDocument Format (ODF)—now ISO 26300—does quite well: IBM's
Workplace, Sun's StarOffice, OpenOffice.org, KOffice, Writerly, AbiWord, and
many others all use the ODF (see Wikipedia for an excellent list of applications
that implement the ODF).
The result of
this open standard? Files can be freely passed among applications. You no
longer need to worry that your colleague or collaborator or any recipient is
using the same applications as you or that you will have to pay for the
privilege of reading a public document created using proprietary technology.
It's the file that counts, not the application. But open standards is but one
half of the coupling.
We need more.
Open standards allow for free exchange of files both now and in the future but
open source allows for anyone to afford the application, both now and in the
future, for open-source applications like OpenOffice.org, which is licensed
under the LGPL, are free, gratis: you pay nothing to use them. This is an
important point: by coupling open standards with open source, OpenOffice.org
gives everyone the ability to participate with no encumbrances in the public
sphere.
How might this work? Let's
imagine that the public sector uses StarOffice or Workplace or OpenOffice.org or
whatever and saves its documents as ODF or PDF files. The government, either
working on its own behalf or with the private sector, installs OpenOffice.org on
computers in all public libraries and other public spaces where it can site a
server or computer. Anyone thus has access to these documents. Is this an
insecure arrangement? No: For open source and open standards are constructed
from the ground up with real-world security issues foremost. Systems and files
can be made secure; security works at every level, and heterogeneity of systems
is allowed, in fact expected (this is the real world). In contrast, Microsoft
claims its systems are really only secure if one only uses them; insecurity
comes from without.
But we know that
blaming the victim, in this case the person affected by the viruses and crashes,
is a poor way to defend oneself. The better argument is to recognize the flaws
in the model. But the model Microsoft has promulgated cannot support a
heterogeneous world where different systems coexist. Open source and open
standards can; they have been designed from the very beginning with that model
in mind.
And the technologies are
maturing. It is the case now that support in Korean and many other languages
exists for OpenOffice.org, which can run on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, and many
other platforms. If you wish to customize it, that's possible, too. The code
and license allows you to write plugins, addons, whatever you need to extend the
application. And if you don't want to do this yourself, it's easy to pay for
someone to do it for you.
So what do
we have? A choice that must be made. I'll paint it starkly: On the one hand, we
have a kind of neo-feudalism privileging the elites and costing the nation
untold millions not just today but tomorrow. On the other, we have open
standards coupled with the free open source and the promotion of markets and
innovation. The first leads to an increasing dependency on foreign companies,
the second drives the growth of national
wealth.
Choose open.
Posted: Wed - May 17, 2006 at 03:52 PM