Open Malaysia

This post was actually meant to be a response to a journalist who asked what I thought about the February 2008 announcement by Microsoft on their "Strategic Changes in Technology and Business Practices to Expand Interoperability". To put into context, this was released on Feb 21st, the weekend before the BRM, so it was not particularly on my mind at that time.

In March, I got a call from the journalist to comment on this issue because they were going to feature it as Microsoft Malaysia was going to make a big re-announcement or something. I gave my thoughts, but never saw the light of day of my input, so I guess its now safe to post my comment.

Groklaw has an extensive list of quotes from far more qualified industry experts, but very few posts as end users from a developing country.

To recap, the announcement is Microsoft's promise in:

1. Ensuring open connections to Microsoft’s high-volume products.
2. Documenting how Microsoft supports industry standards and extensions.
3. Enhancing Office 2007 to provide greater flexibility of document formats.
4. Launching the Open Source Interoperability Initiative.
5. Expanding industry outreach and dialogue.

I have personally experienced #5, however we have yet to see progress with #1, #2 and #3. #4 however is the most interesting for me. I mean "Open Source Interoperability Initiative". That sounds great! Does this mean that Microsoft is opening up to the Open Source was of doing things? I hope so!

Unfortunately its not the case. The transcript of the Press Conference on this announcement reveals the rather major pitfalls (my emphasis):

BRAD SMITH: On the other hand, with respect to companies that are engaged in commercial distribution, or use internally, there is a need to obtain a patent license where there are applicable patent rights, and we're committing to make these patent licenses readily available. Novell already has an agreement with us that covers all of these patent rights. Some other companies, such as Xandros and others, also have a patent license. So they've already addressed all of that, and their users are already addressed. With respect to other distributors, and users, the clear message is that patent licenses will be freely available.

STEVE BALLMER:  Patents will be, not freely, will be available.

BRAD SMITH:  Readily available.

STEVE BALLMER: Readily available for the right fee. The basic economic analysis that you should go through sort of goes like this. We have valuable intellectual property in our patents, we will continue to view that as valuable intellectual property in all forms, and we will monetize from all users of that, not all developers, but for all users of that patented technology, all commercial developers, and all commercial users of that patented technology.

We also have trade secret information, which we will continue to protect, with the exception of some important trade secret information in the interoperability realm, which we will still value, but we will make available free of charge, so that people can do appropriate interoperability. So from an economic perspective you could say, in some senses, we're opening up. Yet, at the same time, we retain valuable intellectual property assets.

On reading the official announcement properly, this is clearly stated:

Microsoft is providing a covenant not to sue open source developers for development or non-commercial distribution of implementations of these protocols. These developers will be able to use the documentation for free to develop products. Companies that engage in commercial distribution of these protocol implementations will be able to obtain a patent license from Microsoft, as will enterprises that obtain these implementations from a distributor that does not have such a patent license.

In a nutshell, they are saying that they will not sue "hobbyist FOSS users and developers" but they will sue FOSS distributors and enterprise end-users who fail to obtain a patent license from Microsoft. This is no bogey man. Its quite clear in the announcement, and the BSA is pretty active in Malaysia, not hesitating in sueing end user companies.

So here is my response as an IT Manager of a local manufacturing company:

As an Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) user in both work and play, I am happy that Microsoft has yet again reiterated their intention to move towards a more interoperable world. According to this initiative, they only provide covenants to FOSS developers for "non-commercial" distribution of implementations of these protocols. For customers of FOSS services, their local enterprise level support may require licensing issues, and this may hinder the local ICT growth of the FOSS ecosystem.

Will each reseller have to 'license' from Microsoft Malaysia? Additionally, this threat to sue in Malaysia may be moot, as software patents registered in the United States is not recognised here in Malaysia. There is therefore no case of infringing any 'Intellectual Property' of this type in countries outside of the US (except for Singapore, Japan, Australia and other countries who have signed on to the US-FTA agreements). Software Patents are vastly different to Copyrights.

As such, this is much of the same rhetoric we have heard from Microsoft since 2003, and I hope that they will show true initiatives of interoperability by adopting more open standards like CSS/HTML, which they recently have in  IE8, and hopefully also the ISO 26300 standard in OpenDocument Format in their office productivity suites.

What is sad about the Microsoft situation is that they seem to want to open up, but their reasons for opening up are not for the right reasons. This halfhearted approach shows in these 'so-called' initiatives. It is also evident that the reluctance to open up is not from upper management at all. Notice how Ballmer corrects Brad Smith. It appears that the vision of the CEO is not shared with the rest of the organisation. One side really needs to correct the other and re-align to better reflect the trends of today.

Here was a golden chance for Microsoft to gain some precious goodwill with the Open Source Community. Instead they botched it up just like they did before, again and again, cementing their reputation as the biggest and baddest anti-FOSS company in existence today.

How many other companies out there have such a anti-FOSS policies? Which company can be so unfriendly to their end users who prefer more choice? Why threaten when you should coax?

Anyway, that was my 2sen 3 months on. Every year Microsoft announces a new initiative for Interoperability. Hopefully next year they take genuine steps towards this goal and not just bandy about this rather overused term.

[Update: 1:20pm May 21st.
Here were Ditesh's quotes,  as an Open Source Developer, on this matter.

"Microsoft's Interoperability Initiative is geared to ensure that software (open source or otherwise) run well on Microsoft platforms. It is important to view this in its correct perspective: there has been very little effort from Microsoft to ensure its own software runs well on competing platforms. In other words, this initiative locks down users to Microsoft platforms instead of offering true interoperability which puts users and customers in charge by offering them choice and flexibility.

Interoperability must always been seen as a two way street, and history has taught us that true interoperability only works to the benefit of all members of the software industry when it is based on existing industry accepted open standards. Unfortunately, Microsoft has decided not to pursue this with their initiative and has chosen a very restrictive approach that does not benefit the overall software industry.

My second observation is that Microsoft's initiative seeks to bar open source developers from participating freely and openly in their program, as Microsoft is insisting on its protocol patents and that open source developers cannot engage in commercial development.

Firstly, no interoperability program should ever mandate that developers desist from developing and distributing commercial programs. Such a mandate would be a death-knell to the software industry and it clearly only benefits Microsoft. Any attempt to stop competition in the market by insisting on non-commercial development, as Microsoft's initiative seeks to achieve, will have extremely harmful and lasting effect on the industry as a whole.

Secondly, software patents have been rejected soundly in many countries (most stunningly in the European Union) due to the chilling effects it would have on the software industry. In fact, there has been studies showing evidence of the harm of software patents to the industry. As such, any initiative that insists on software patents will simply fail over the long term as the industry will reject initiatives that result in monopolies that hurt overall industry growth prospects."

]

yk.

May 17, 2008 is Open Malaysia blog's 2nd. birthday!
HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

The first post 2 years ago declared, "This is a blog
about openness, saying that the changing times call for innovation through open collaboration." Open innovation, ODF, open standards and open source were what we championed then and what we still champion today.

Malaysia had voted Approval of ODF as an ISO standard just before this blog started 2 years ago. OOXML came into the picture since then, but in the last one year, Malaysia cannot be considered to have officially accepted OOXML -- the Malaysian National Body committees  (TC4, then ISC G) voted Disapproval of OOXML, and the Malaysia final vote of Abstention decided by the Minister is at best non-committal to OOXML.

On the blog's 1st. birthday on May 17, 2007, there were 194 posts and 163 comments. In the one year after that, we added 111 posts but the number of comments tripled to 512 comments within the same one year! The worldwide dialog created by this blog was awesome.

In the 1st. year, we had 32,000 visits (by Sitemeter). In the 2nd. year, the month of March 2008 alone had 32,000 visits, with a total of 100,000 visits in the whole of this 2nd. year. The most popular post was definitely The Last Lap on the OOXML results which attracted thousands of visits every day.

Yes, the times they are a-changing. I leave it to you to recount the changes you have seen in "openness" in Malaysia and elsewhere over the last year -- do write your comments below.

I always have a 2 month backlog of podcasts because fortunately I don't spend too much time in the car. This morning, I started catching up with Cranky Geeks, a vidcast of John C Dvorak and his fellow cranks who gripe about the state of technology today.

I was surprised when they brought up the topic of OOXML. Here is a transcript (and my emphasis in bold) of their conversation (mp4 mp3):

John C Dvorak, Chief Crank, "dvorak.org/blog"

Sebastian Rupley, Co-Crank, Editorial Director, PCMagCast.com

Lance Ulanoff, Editor-in-Chief, PC Magazine

Veronica Belmont, Host/Producer, Mahalo Daily

Time: 15:00

JD: Microsoft OOXML has finally passed... Anybody here have a clue .. because Microsoft has been fighting it, fighting it fighting it, ... what do they want this for?

SR: Because the OpenDocument Format was the competitor for this, which is what the open source community wanted, and that would be basically and easy translatable way from all kinds of products, from open source to commercial products to exchange documents. Microsoft has its eyes on a proprietary type of format based on XML based on all its ...

JD: ... buts its gotta be open, its gotta be a standard, not proprietary .. ?

SR: Its not open though, this is really a shame I think that this went through. There also are some rumours, that there were voting irregularities, that Microsoft pulled stunts, in getting this passed. It means we have to jump through hoops like getting the translator to download, mobile translator that they have now,  for the 'x' documents that we do. Its a pain and it shouldnt happen ...

VB: Is this the DOCX? It confused the hell out of my mom I can tell you.

LU: It is driving people in the office and my office CRAZY, because every once in a while, a docx file shows up. Now if you want to open it you got to download the compatibility module for Office 2003.

SR: And its not just DOCX too, I get people sending me PPTX. "I cant open this PowerPoint, could you open it and rename it, save it to your disk and resend it back to me so that I can open it?"

VB: My dad installed the newest version of office on my Mom's computer at home, and she's not techie, but she uses Word everyday. And suddenly all her files were DOCX. And she was trying to open things, and send things to co-workers, and she just couldn't figure it out. ...

Im like .. thats ..?

SR: Its ridiculous

LU: There should be a rule that we are not allowed to go past 3 characters for file extensions.

JD: What is the point of docx?[1]

LU: Its like XML is a widely used standard for companies to inter-operate because they will have a structured document. Its a big document so theres a kind of description of what the document is going to be like, and then there is the different parts plug in to that, and as long as you have those two things riding separately, you can easily change stuff and have a whole vast set of documents changed.

At the desktop level, I dont entirely understand what the massive benefit is going to be, I think Microsoft understands it better than others, er, I have no idea whether or not they push people hard, but Microsoft wants to own something ...

JD: whats the thing on that movie 'Officespace', the guy who always had the TP report or whatever it was: TPS report ...

SR: Yes, its funny when they bring the birthday cake out "Whats the cake to person ratio" .. ?

JD: that would be for this report, you can make one change, and not worry about changing the coversheet, because it all would be automated. So I think they would be watching that movie too often apparently in Microsoft.

[1] It was pretty accurate up to the point Lance tries to explain what OOXML was, and when John tries to equate OOXML as a templating engine. Ah well, at least Sebastian Rupley really gets it and understands how harmful OOXML is as an international standard. It would have been better if he had more "airtime" in explaining the issues regarding this. And perhaps even elaborating on the "irregularities".

What is really interesting is how these people "in the know" have real world experience of these new file formats in the wild, and what the reaction is to them. Like the uptake of Vista, its pretty much negative.

Its also funny that the segment before this was about the April Fools pranks which occurred online. I think its quite unfortunate for Microsoft that their hollow victory (if its one at all) would fall on April the First. Well, whether the joke's on us or not, OOXML to me will always be remembered as the April Fools' Standard.

ps. Where's the Final Text for DIS 29500? Shouldnt it be out oh, 12 days ago? I should have guessed and expected as much, though; Microsoft has always found it difficult to released anything in time. Im just surprised that ISO has allowed their enshrined processes to be infected by the Microsoft vapourware release cycles so quickly. I would have thought maybe OOXML v1.2 or v2.0. But even before v1.0? Shurely... Is this considered yet another irregularity in the process? Maybe they are hiding it from us so that we have less time to review the changes before the deadline to appeal on 1st June. How are we expected to go through 6000 7000 8000 pages in the next 2 weeks?