02.27.08
BRM And Why You Should Be Concerned
There is a long-held tradition in this country as well as Europe, that we should promote competitive markets and that we should oppose the abuse of monopolies.
Over the past several years, Microsoft has proven themselves adept at using their monopoly power to squeeze other companies out of their particular parts of the market. The resulting loss of choice caused consumers to pay higher prices and lose access to any improvements that would have been made available.
A few years ago, a number of companies in the industry started work on a vendor-neutral format. That format became OpenDocument Format (ODF), standardized by OASIS and by the ISO as an industry and international standard for office documents. Although Microsoft was a member of OASIS, where the format was defined, they chose not to participate–after all, they have a monopoly in office software which they would risk losing if anyone else could read and write the same file formats with full fidelity. Instead, Microsoft created something called Office Open XML (OOXML), or as I call it, Not-so-open XML.
OOXML was submitted to Ecma to standardize–with the requirement that whatever Ecma decide on had to be fully-compatible with their pre-defined format used in their Office 2007 product (which hadn’t been released when Ecma started their work). Ecma then submitted this second file format to ISO to be standardized as an international standard for office documents. OOXML, beside some ongoing questions about the legal ability for other software to use the standard, is also designed with all sorts of compatibility features, meant to carry the mistakes of prior generations of office software into the foreseeable future. OOXML has a number of unspecified secret areas which are mostly the same things about Microsoft’s file formats that were historically used to keep competing companies in the dark about how to properly read and write their formats.
This move to standardize OOXML was turned back in September of 2007, when the ISO fast-track ballot to approve it failed. Now, the ISO is giving Microsoft/Ecma a second chance to try to pass OOXML. Because Microsoft’s business strategy depends upon the income from its twin monopolies (Windows and Office), they are really running a full-court press to try to push this off on the world.
Standards attorney Andy Updegrove has a pretty expressive essay that describes some of the issues that are now apparent, in particular the need for standards that are industry-wide, vendor-neutral, and unrestricted (by “intellectual property”, licensing restrictions, or fees) for any use by governmental agencies of any kind.
Many of the most important groups promoting software freedom (not price freedom, as in “free beer”) have urged that OOXML not be standardized until it is altered to be the kind of standard that Andy is describing.
Now Google, the Web’s leading search engine and advertising platform, has joined in, urging that ISO not standardize OOXML in its present form.
Do you have files from several years ago that you are required to maintain? Is your present software able to properly read/interpret/process those files? If you lost access to the original application or version of the application, is the file format an open standard format which you could pay someone to write an import filter for your present software? If the answer to any of those questions is “no”, you are a hostage to closed and proprietary file formats.
While OOXML pretends to be open, it is really a proprietary format in drag. Join Mr. Updegrove, Groklaw, the Free Software Foundation, the FSF Europe, ByteFree, Google, and myself in urging ISO and your country’s “national body” ISO representative group to reject OOXML.
Microsoft can be a great company when it is pressed to compete. IE7 is miles ahead of IE6, thanks to competition from Firefox. If OOXML is rejected and governments begin to use ODF for all their editable documents, Microsoft will implement ODF and both we and they will be better off for it.
