[Openstds] BBC: Questions for Microsoft on open formats

[Georg C. F. Greve]

[ http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6291124.stm ]

   Questions for Microsoft on open formats

   After Microsoft announced it would work with the UK National Archives
   to help open old digital document formats, Georg Greve and Joachim
   Jakobs, of the Free Software Foundation Europe, question the US
   giant's motives.

   Today's customers drive the technological development of tomorrow.
   This insight is common sense.

   But when the same customers pay one and the same company for first
   creating a problem and then pay them again for solving that problem,
   most people would expect the customer to be dissatisfied. Although,
   at least some people seem to be pleased.

   The problem: Microsoft dominates the desktop and office market with a
   share of more than 90%. Any document stored in their proprietary
   binary formats and especially every document shared between multiple
   people strengthens the monopoly and harms competition, economy and
   society as a whole.

   The more widely these formats are being used, the higher the network
   effect forcing others into the same dependency - just as it happened
   to the UK National Archives.

   What happened: Microsoft asked the UK National Archives to invest in
   a solution that would grant access to their legacy data.

   Only last week BBC News reported on Mr. Gordon Frazer, managing
   director of Microsoft UK, who voiced concern that customers could
   lose their own data: "Unless more work is done to ensure legacy file
   formats can be read and edited in the future, we face a digital dark
   hole."

   This is a surprisingly honest statement from a company that is the
   largest provider of incompatible and undocumented legacy file formats
   in the world.

   The best solution Microsoft can apparently offer is to "emulate" the
   old versions of Windows under the current version of Windows Vista.

   Indeed some libraries and museums may want to offer an idea of the
   previous ages of computing, and not all of them may want to offer the
   fully authentic experience of running it on the old hardware to get
   the original "look and feel" of bygone times.

   But are the UK National Archives primarily a museum dedicated to
   preserving the original experience of ages and technologies long
   past?  Or are they focused on archiving the knowledge, thoughts and
   ideas of the generations we build upon?

   The broad audience may not want to read Caesar in the hand writing of
   a particular scribe on the original clay tablets or skin.

   Images of them would normally be sufficient, although indeed most
   people would prefer a transcription on paper or screen may be
   sufficient.

   Even more people are probably served best with a good translation.
   File formats are the equivalent of the transcription, they encode the
   original writing into a form for storage.

   This idea is not new. Humankind has always sought to preserve its
   knowledge, as is documented by clay tablets, scrolls and cave
   paintings of ages long past.

   But while the storage medium can last for a very long time, sometimes
   the meaning is lost because the key to the information is lost.

   In modern terms: We no longer know the encoding used for the cave
   paintings.

   Digital information could potentially be stored without loss of
   quality for a very long time to come.

   But without knowledge about the encoding, our documents will become a
   meaningless series of ones and zeroes to future generations, just
   like cave paintings are too often meaningless bits of colour on stone
   to us.

   The best way to preserve the encoding is to spread it as far as
   possible, to make it a public good that is preserved with the same or
   higher diligence than the encoded information itself.

   At best, there is currently only one company that knows exactly how
   it has implemented its proprietary legacy file formats.

   If Microsoft had used Open Standards from the moment it was founded
   in 1975, this problem would not exist.

   In fact, the users of GNOME Office, Koffice or OpenOffice.org would
   have no problems reading documents written by users of Microsoft (MS)
   Office.

   As it is, the stability of the encoding completely depends on the
   future existence and behaviour of one company.

   Thanks to the co-operation of many companies that find themselves in
   strong competition, but understand the necessity of preserving the
   encoding, there is an Open Standard for office documents: the
   "OpenDocument format" (ODF), which is maintained and further
   developed by OASIS, an international e-business standardisation
   organisation, and has been certified by the International
   Organisation for Standardization (ISO).

   Microsoft has said it has its own open format, called MS-OOXML. But
   there are serious doubts whether MS-OOXML can be considered an Open
   Standard: Like a Russian doll, it wraps a number of legacy formats
   like "Word95" or "Word6", which are not publicly available and can
   only be implemented by Microsoft.

   Another issue is that OOXML may be subject to patent claims.
   Ultimately the development of the format depends completely on the
   future existence of one company. Can we bet our future on Microsoft
   to exist in 4007?

   The impact of such dual standards was recently explained by Open
   Forum Europe, a business association with members such as Fujitsu
   Siemens, Hewlett Packard, IBM, Intel, Novell and Sun.

   Their conclusion was to back ODF: "Multiple Open standards in the
   area of Interoperability are unwelcome, costly and impractical for
   both users and suppliers, and will be rejected by the market."

   The public needs to understand: As long as only Microsoft can write
   software that will be able to make use of the full extent of the
   predominant office file format, Microsoft will remain the predominant
   vendor for lack of alternatives and competition.

   In order to make MS-OOXML the predominant file format, Microsoft is
   now seeking approval through ISO for its format, expecting its market
   dominance and global lobbying efforts to coerce a sufficient amount
   of national standardisation bodies into approving MS-OOXML at ISO.

   We have laid down six questions we want Microsoft to answer - but the
   key one is this: Why did and does Microsoft refuse to participate in
   the existing standardisation effort?

   http://fsfeurope.org/documents/msooxml-questions

-- 
Georg C. F. Greve                                 <greve at fsfeurope.org>
Free Software Foundation Europe	                 (http://fsfeurope.org)
Join the Fellowship and protect your freedom!     (http://www.fsfe.org)
What everyone should know about DRM                   (http://DRM.info)
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