Massachusetts embraces open standards, shuns Microsoft


The commonwealth of Massachusetts has decided to only use products that conform to the Open Document Format for Office Applications, or OpenDocument. All state agencies that are part of the executive branch must migrate to OpenDocument-compliant applications by January 1, 2007. Since Microsoft, whose business model relies on closed, proprietary standards to lock-in people to their Windows-Office based platform, does not support OpenDocument format, Bill Gates & Co. will soon find themselves ousted from Massachusetts executive government.

This is a welcome move. If only the federal government had proceeded in this direction, rather than wasting their time with a costly and ineffective antitrust suit against the Redmond corporation. Why should anyone had cared what happened to Netscape at the hands of Internet Explorer? The fact is, both Netscape and Microsoft were trying to use closed standards to force people to use their products. Microsoft had a lot more muscle, so it crushed Netscape out of existence. Best thing that could have happened, too, because it ultimately led to Firefox, the best browser on the Windows and Linux platforms. In the meantime, the main issue with Microsoft was being ignored: Microsoft was a creature, not of market forces, but of an obsolete patent and copyright system supported by the government. Microsoft was a patent-monopoly that used copyright law to force people to use their software. The file formats of the Office suite were all closed and proprietary. In order to open a Word document or an Excel spreadsheat or Powerpoint presentation, you had to pay Microsoft for the appropriate software. People would create documents in formats that, barring a software purchase, they did not have a legal right to open. Imagine if you had to pay hundreds of dollars to a company simply to use the paper on which you had printed an article or a book! Yet that is precisely the situation companies that had used Microsoft products in the past found themselves in. These companies might have thousands of Word, Powerpoint, and Excel documents. Their clients might be sending them documents in these closed formats. If they wanted to be able to open these documents, they had to continue to use these products. But note one thing. How did they put themselves in this position? Did anyone force them to use Word, Powerpoint, and Excel? No, not originally. After it became the standard, many companies didn't have a choice. But before it became the standard, the choice was theirs. The problem is, those people who originally choose Microsoft Office and helped turn it into the dominant standard didn't understand the importance of supporting open standards, any why it is not a good idea to create documents using a format you don't own and can't access without the proprietary software. Open standards is the key to opening up the computing world to real competition. With closed standards, you have patent monopolies like Microsoft that can crush all semblance of competition, as we see in office software. Those who were worried about Microsoft's monopolistic power need look no further than here. If you wanted to curb Microsoft's power, force open standards on them. But this was not seen as an option in antitrust suit, because Microsoft's competitors, those who supported to suit, no more wanted to see open standards prevail than did Microsoft. Yet that would be the only remedy.

It would be very simple to accomplish. Merely pass a law that software which does not support open standards cannot be legally copyrighted. That would settle it. The copyright laws, as we know them, were made primarily to protect the written word. They were not devised to protect software. Software is a different animal than a book. A great book is immortal. It will be read for thousands of years. But a software program can easily be outmoded within a few years. So why do we afford software the same copyright protection as books? Most software doesn't even have a single author, but is created by scores of programmers. So what is the point of copyright protection that lasts for decades? Why are protecting software that is not even sold or supported? If a company abandons a program (abandoning its many users in the process) shouldn't they be required, as part of their copyright agreement, to open source it? After all, the granting of copyright protection is tantamount to providing monopoly protection from the state. The state is in effect granting the copyright holder a monopoly in the intellectual property protected by the copyright. That is perfectly justifiable as a way of protecting and encouraging intellectual innovation. Yet it shouldn't merely be a one-way street, with the privileges going in only one direction. Fine, we give copyright holders a state-sponsored monopoly. But shouldn't they give us something in return?

The primary reason so many people are unhappy with Microsoft is because Microsoft reached its dominant position, not by producing the best software, but by using copyright protection to lock people into using their products. By reforming the copyright laws in regards to software, we can fix this problem. Software, as intellectual protect, can still be protected by copyright, but it doesn't have to be protected in a way that allows for monopoly abuse and the stifling of nearly all competition. Require all software copyright holders to support standards, and you can have the best of both worlds: the protection of intellectual property and healthy competition among software vendors.

Posted: Fri - September 23, 2005 at 11:54 PM          

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