[Openstds] Press coverage of DCOS

[Robin Gross]

http://www.cbronline.com/article_news_print.asp?guid=AD0B215C-5207-43F8-9515-581C519D1D84


  Sun to plug OpenDocument to global summit

31st October 2006
By Kevin Murphy


    Sun Microsystems Inc and like-minded organizations will promote the
    use of open standards, including the OpenDocument Format much feared
    by Microsoft Corp, at the Internet Governance Forum summit this week
    in Athens, Greece.

The company, along with supporters including IP Justice and the Consumer 
Project on Technology, will urge governments to adopt procurement 
practices that recognize open technology standards as important, and 
forbid buying only proprietary technology.

The inaugural IGF meeting, which kicked off yesterday, is being attended 
by about 1,500 members of international governments, civil society 
organizations, private companies, academics and media. The forum was 
created by the UN-backed World Summit on the Information Society a year ago.

Today, Sun and others are expected to announce the formation of the "IGF 
Dynamic Coalition on Open Standards", an apparently ad hoc coalition of 
organizations that support open standards.

This DCOS, which is not believed to yet have any kind of formal IGF or 
intergovernmental endorsement, will present two papers for discussion at 
a workshop in Athens on Thursday.

The papers, available for viewing now at cptech.org, argue that adopting 
open standards is useful to spur adoption of the internet in developing 
countries, and that open standards are currently "in jeopardy" due to 
vendors plugging proprietary interfaces.

"The social value of interfaces has increased; so has their business 
value," the paper says. Software patents and proprietary APIs "are now 
being used to manipulate the direction of the network effect and to 
thwart widespread interoperability of computer programs" and this, the 
paper says, "will be particularly harmful to developing countries."

Another paper to be discussed deals specifically with government 
procurement practices. It addresses government as tech buyer, tech 
policymaker and tech producer, and in each context urges governments to 
support open standards.

Governments should "ban procurement policies from requiring 
compatibility with proprietary technologies or proprietary ICT 
standards" and "ban procurement policies from specifying particular 
brands, manufacturers, or products", the paper says.

"'Openness' is best judged by the number of competing, fully 
substitutable implementations of the standard," the paper suggests.

While the two discussion documents presented by CPTech do not 
specifically call out the OpenDocument Format, the document format used 
in Sun's StarOffice and the open-source OpenOffice.org, it is pretty 
clear that ODF is a priority for the DCOS coalition.

For well over a year supporters of ODF have been pursuing governmental 
support for the standard as a key stepping stone into more widespread 
adoption. But they've faced opposition from Microsoft. Redmond has 
substantial lobbying clout, and a $3bn-a-quarter Office business.

The state of Massachusetts losing its chief technology officer after a 
public argument about mandating ODF support in procurement, is probably 
the most prominent example of governmental support for ODF giving 
Microsoft the heebie jeebies.

CPTech's James Love blogged about governments' reluctance to adopt ODF 
earlier this month.

"Many people are nervous about these issues, because Microsoft is 
investing millions to defeat them, and to attack personally government 
officials who Microsoft sees as too friendly to open standards, and to 
reward politicians and government officials who back Microsoft," he wrote.

CPTech is the small non-governmental organization founded 11 years ago 
by veteran consumer rights activist and former US presidential candidate 
Ralph Nader. It is currently headed by Love, who is also a prominent 
blogger at the Huffington Post.

So many governmental IT policymakers in the same building as corporate 
interests and issue-based groups is obviously a rare opportunity for any 
NGO or IT vendor that has an interest in promoting their view of the 
industry's future.

While much of the discussion at the IGF summit so far has focused on 
naming, addressing and internationalization (see separate story), the 
meeting does have development, capacity building, openness and access as 
some of its key memes.

The DCOS coalition may have one influential ally in the form of Vint 
Cerf, the co-inventor of TCP/IP, Google vice president and chairman of 
ICANN. While he does not appear to be directly involved in Thursday's 
workshop, he advocated similar beliefs during prepared remarks at the 
IGF opening ceremony in Athens yesterday.

"Digital documents often need to be interpreted by special software 
packages to be rendered in understandable form," he said, according to 
an IGF transcript. "Steps are needed to assure that the information we 
accumulate today will be usable not merely decades but centuries and 
even millennia into the future."

While Cerf very well may not have been directly advocating open 
standards such as ODF, the idea of preserving data access far into the 
future is one of the values of open standards frequently cited by ODF 
supporters.

The Thursday workshop will have speakers including: Brazil's secretary 
of information technology Rogerio Santanna; Magdy Nagi, head of IT at 
Egypt's Library of Alexandria; CPTech's Love, Eddan Katz of the Yale 
Information Society Project, Robin Gross of IP Justice, Susy Struble of 
Sun, Daniel Dardieller of the W3C and Georg Greve of the Free Software 
Foundation Europe.

 
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