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Last Friday I helped facilitate a workshop about the technical and legal feasibility of OOXML (check out the website, it has some interesting reading) in an attempt to get an understanding about where all parties are coming from and assist Standards Australia in understanding the issue from a holistic perspective (they have had quite a few flames targetted at them from both sides of the fence). This is just an initial report and I will be publishing the full audio from the technical event as soon as I can rip it from tape to digital.

I organised the technical speakers, including Matthew Cruickshank (New Zealand XML expert, contributor to a no vote in NZ and covenor of the very useful iso-vote website), Colin Jackson (who gave the NZ Gov perspective and overview of why NZ voted no), Rick Jelliffe (who participates in ISO, has done a small amount of work for Microsoft on this topic, and seems fairly neutral in person. He can come across as pro-Microsoft, although in reality he is probably just pro-“creating new ISO standards will fix everything”). We also had representation from Google (Lars Rasmussen), IBM (Paul Robinson), OSIA (Jeff stepped in by request from Brendan Scott and represented the OSIA view), and Microsoft (Greg Stone with 2 others). Janet was supposed to be there to represent LA (although most of her comments were for the legal section which was in the afternoon and I personally had to leave, so hopefully some of the blogs linked at the bottom of this cover that). We also had Alistair Tegart from Standards Australia, who is the person leading the SA investigation into OOXML, and it was great to have him both listen and participate. Overall, I’m really happy with how it all went.

The technical discussion was quite interesting. Firstly almost everyone said it was good to see Microsoft trying to be more open and make available standards that have been very proprietary forever. Then it went back and forth between actual technical issues and big picture issues. Most people agreed the technical issues were mostly reconcilable given time, for instance a whole bunch of technical concerns raised by Standards Australia in their “abstain with comments” vote have already been fixed apparently.

Some core technical issues raised were:

• Accessibility – Matthew had great concerns about compliance to mechanisms that ensure accessibility is possible
• Interoperability and access to data across multiple platforms – particularly when OOXML uses a lot of non-open undocumented standards (such as Microsoft’s DrawingML) as part of its inner workings rather than leveraging existing documented and ISO approved standards (such as SVG). This usage of pre-existing standards is supposedly one of the key criteria ISO look for in a new standard, but anyway
• The implementability of DIS29500 – Several people said it was a lot of work to actually implement DIS29500. Jeff mentioned this is trivial for a lot of mature FOSS projects that have already had to do the work with older MS formats and that this is easier than reverse engineering. However, it was agreed on by several participants (include Google, OSIA and Archives) that it would certainly be difficult for organisations or new software projects who have to start from scratch as it is a dense, complex document with many legacy and undocumented assumptions and formats

The biggest issues raised and left unresolved were big picture issues, and I have to say I agree with all of these concerns. They were generally brushed off by both Microsoft and Rick. The biggest issues raised in no particular order were:

• Harmonisation – Microsoft believes harmonisation is impossible and a lot of work. Everyone else thought harmonisation is not only possible but both really important and not as hard as is being made out. Lars even invited Microsoft to come participate in ODF so that it would meet their needs. They didn’t really have an answer for this apart from repeating that is was hard, and making some comment about the risk of a “third standard” which Matthew pointed out is part of the natural versioning process of standards development, and that ideally harmonisation would mean MS changes would be folded into a next generation version of ODF.
• A single standard – most people agreed that ODF was an existing standard that has industry and community buy-in and collaboration, and that it should be built upon rather than creating new standards. Everyone agreed that ODF has some issues and doesn’t include all the functionality MS wants, however it was pointed our several times that if MS wanted to participate in ODF then they could, so the question was raised why they don’t. There wasn’t much of an answer here. Jeff, Mike and Lars pointed out that supporting multiple standards that do fundamentally the same thing will make it much harder for organisations to support real interoperability, and so by accepting DIS29500, ISO is basically complicating a plethora of business, archival, competition and other factors. Jeff made the comments that “there is not sufficient technical rationale behind another standard in this area”, and was very supportive of industry collaboration on ODF
• The review process – several people expressed concern at the fast-tracking of DIS29500, and whether there has been adequate review. It was also mentioned that the review allocated to DIS29500 is by far proportionally smaller than ODF, PDF, or many other examples
• The ingoing maintenance of OOXML – One of the maintenance models for DIS29500 proposed is that ECMA will 100% maintain current and future versions of DIS29500 with input but no control of QA from ISO. This seems ludicrous in the extreme. If this model was taken up basically future versions of DIS29500 would be ISO standards by default with basically only ECMA and Microsoft to be accountable. And these future versions could contain _anything_. Greg Stone was quick to mention that there are several models on the table, my thoughts are this in itself should result in a no vote as it completely subverts the entire process (even more)
• Why ISO – It was pointed out by Microsoft on several occasions that surely having OOXML openly documented was better than not having it openly documented. Everyone agreed with this (it is far easier than reverse engineering a proprietary format). It was made clear however that OOXML is already documented through the ECMA process so what purpose does it serve to have it as an ISO standard, and that there is no value to this when they could participate in the process of harmonisation with ODF as described above. This I think is a big question. People talk about OOXML becoming a standard. It is already a standard, an ECMA standard, so it was very disingenuous for Microsoft to pull the “but we are trying to be open” card at this point. ISO standardisation doesn’t improve the documentation made freely available.

Some interesting arguments that Rick brought up that I hadn’t heard before were:

• The standard doesn’t reflect the actual implementation. DIS29500 doesn’t mean the same as OOXML. So arguing against OOXML is actually not going to necessarily help you in battling DIS29500 acceptance. How Microsoft or anyone else decides to implement DIS29500 is not the concern or responsibility of ISO.
• The conformance language in DIS29500 is really bad and needs serious work.
• The steering committee in ISO responsible for OOXML (as well as ODF, PDF and others) is committed to ZRAND (Zero cost, Reasonale and Non-Discriminatory standards) as opposed to RAND (same as ZRAND but with fees associated).

It has to be said I have a lot more respect for Rick for in person (although his blog coverage of the event was again quite one-sided) and I don’t believe he is generally supporting Microsoft per se, but rather he genuinely believes the more standards the better. Also, the guy has actually received death wishes over this, which is never an acceptable way to deal with disagreement, ever. He mentioned another colleague who has also received threatening calls. This is coming from both sides of the fence and reflects badly on everyone. Anyway, he said several times that ISO acceptance of DIS29500 doesn’t mandate using it, and how that is up to individual organisations and Governments to decide, so there is no problem or even a huge impact in DIS29500 being an ISO standard. However, as Mike Carden pointed out this is fairly disingenuous given that so many Governments have to date used ISO as the standard of standards which has a massive knock on effect on uptake and competition, especially when there is an existing collaboratively developed standard that fulfills that niche (and could fulfill Microsofts’ “unique” needs if they actually participated in it). Unfortunately for ISO I know people in Governments from around the world (and locally) who will be seriously reconsidering that assumption now.

I managed to get the last word in to the technical discussion (yay) and I basically said that given all the unresolved issues, concerns from industry and the broader community, lack of finalised information (such as what model DIS29500 would be maintained under) and general controversy, perhaps it would be most prudent for Standards Australia to vote “no” for DIS29500 and Microsoft can choose to put DIS29500 through the normal non-fast track process for proper analysis and appraisal if they want. Standards Australia originally gave an abstain vote. I think that needs to be carefully weighed up and understood that if there isn’t enough information to make a clear “yes” decision stating a lack of information, then the default should be no, because how can Standards Australia (or any other standards body) feel comfortable with a standard passing ISO ratification if they can’t even feel comfortable with it themselves? I know there are many people deeply concerned about this right through from community, business and Government, and it will be interesting to see what happens to the general trust in and acceptance of ISO regardless of what happens with DIS29500.

Please find a few blog posts and other references below:

• Email short report from Mike Carden
• Oliver Bell’s blog
• Brendan Scott’s blog about legal foo prior to the event. He also did a good announcement about OSIA’s position along with supporting documentation here
• Rick Jelliffe’s blog – I’m particularly disappointed with this post. He told me on the day it was one of the best and most civil discussions he’s had (although I left before most of the legal session, so who knows 🙂 )

Finally a huge thanks to David Vaile and the Cyberlaw team who ran both events. These are the same people who ran the GPL V3 event last year (which I also helped facilitate) which included Eben Moglen (by phone), Andrew Tridgell and others.

Comments, additional reports about the event and feedback welcome.

I will note there have been some other reports about this event (prior to the event) that were slanderous, malicious, uninformed and assumed that I am part of a massive conspiracy to thwart the progress of freedom (in spite of the years of being very publicly and actively committed to FOSS and software freedom). I have not linked to those as I think they a) don’t contribute to the content, b) are unnecessarily malicious and assume the absolute worst and c) don’t deserve my googejuice 🙂

Edit: Matthew Cruickshank just sent me his paper on accessibility which includes a whole schwag of technical and other useful perspectives. Find it here

I got dragged into the OOXML debate only in October this year, prior to which I had avoided it in the comfortable (and incorrect) knowledge that it was being taken care of in Australia by people far more in the know than me. While in NZ I was chatting to the folk there who have lobbied hard and resulted in a “no with comments” vote for NZ and I realised I could have a positive impact in getting the debate on track in Australia. After all, Australia abstained from the last vote and we have one last chance come February to make a stand.

The main problem I’ve found as I’ve waded into the dark and murky waters of this topic is that the moment you try to take a logical even-handed approach, you are basically demonised by one or both sides of the debate. If you don’t take the emphatic “OOXML is evil and btw ODF is pure shining light!” approach, then random people in the FOSS community start to question your motives and credibility, which I can tell you, gets old pretty quickly. Particularly after both Jeff and I have spent so many years committed to the progress of FOSS and software freedom both locally and internationally. People don’t seem to understanding that taking an extreme stance puts you squarely on one side of the fence and makes it harder for the people actually making this decision to take what you have to say seriously.

It is like people in the FOSS community saying to Government “you are not using FOSS everywhere already, so you must be getting paid off, there must be a conspiracy! You are all bastards!”, and then wondering some people in Government have reservations about FOSS. Luckily there are a lot of very smart people in Government (in Australia) who are already using, writing policy about, and understanding that a good knowledge of FOSS helps them make more educated decisions about their ICT procurement generally. Which actually helps them choose FOSS where it makes sense, in spite of the loud offensive voices in the community.

Anyway, I am running an OOXML technical feasibility event on Friday in which I have experts from New Zealand and Australia speaking, as well as a variety of industry and community perspectives. The idea of this event is to understand whether OOXML is actually technically feasible (and there is a legal event in the afternoon for the same purpose). I believe that if OOXML is not technically feasible (which many people in the FOSS community take for granted) then it is a simple, practical and non-political reason to have a no vote for Australia.

I just found this blog post which also reflects the frustration felt by many people trying to understand what is going on without all the political wailing on both sides of the fence:

So, what I have gleaned from my researches (though that is probably too strong a word) so far is that while there are some valid discussions to be had, the majority of participants are either staunchly pro-ODF, or they are working for Microsoft. I do know that, were I an end-user, I would remain ignorant – but given the mud flying around, perhaps ignorance is bliss.

I will probably need to keep my mudproof raincoat on for a little while yet.

Responding to survey results prepared recently by OSIA, the Australian Labor Party, the Liberal-National Coalition, the Australian Democrats and the Australian Greens have all voiced strong support for the adoption of Free and Open Source Software for both boosting local ICT development and ensuring open and interoperable standards.

Awesome work by Open Source Industry Australia in this excellent little document that outlines the perspectives of all the major parties towards Open Source.

In the answers, Labor refers to their “10 year strategy for software” which was announced in 2004. In it was this little gem:

A 10-year strategy for software and digital content would also be created under a Labor government, Lundy said. This strategy would aim to increase the local software industry’s global market share by focusing on open source development and partnering with SMEs.

The change in Government has provided the FOSS community and industry a real opportunity to get FOSS on the political agenda, and into a meaningful discussion about the broader benefits FOSS can offer both economically and socially to Australia.