[A2k] Open Document Format at Global Summit

[James Love]

http://www.computerwire.com/industries/research/?pid=3DB9AEF11C%2D5633%
2D4667%2DA59A%2DF31E53D9C3DC

Sun to Plug OpenDocument to Global Summit

Date: 31 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
=93IGF Dynamic Coalition on Open Standards=94, 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 =93in
jeopardy=94 due to vendors plugging proprietary interfaces.

=93The social value of interfaces has increased; so has their business
value,=94 the paper says. Software patents and proprietary APIs =93are
now being used to manipulate the direction of the network effect and
to thwart widespread interoperability of computer programs=94 and this,
the paper says, =93will be particularly harmful to developing countries.=94

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 =93ban procurement policies from requiring
compatibility with proprietary technologies or proprietary ICT
standards=94 and =93ban procurement policies from specifying particular
brands, manufacturers, or products=94, the paper says.

=93'Openness' is best judged by the number of competing, fully
substitutable implementations of the standard,=94 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.

=93Many 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,=94 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=92s 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.


---------------------------------
James Love, CPTech / www.cptech.org / mailto:james.love@cptech.org /
tel. +1.202.332.2670 / mobile +1.202.361.3040

(ODF reminder:  documents with the extention .odt or  can be opened
in OpenOffice.org, abiword and a few other applications such as
docs.google.com.   Microsoft, Apple and Corel should be encouraged to
support ODF).