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ACTA; war over. We win. Again
<originally a Dutch Webwereld.nl column>
According to Dutch Economics Minister Maxime Verhagen, ‘ordinary’ people have nothing to fear from ACTA. This treaty is merely designed to shut down child pornography sites. Go to the link and have another listen (in Dutch), because he really does say this!
That’s good because, although I quite like a good download, I tend to limit myself to movies and books that fall a little more within the acceptable media spectrum. However, this statement gives us a fascinating glimpse into the mind of our Minister-of-All. Apparently in the case of distribution of photographic evidence of actual child abuse he is first and foremost concerned with possible copyright infringement. Is this a professional contortion or is he simply exceptionally goal orientated? This is what journalists should be pouncing on. For the lulz.
But beauty emerges even from the surrealist farce that is modern western copyright policy. No, I’m not talking about more music, movies or books, for there is no evidence that more culture is created by fanatically prosecuting 14-year olds for downloading. However, the recent weeks have clearly shown the usefulness of a common enemy. Thanks to ACTA, more Europeans than ever are involved in a critical discussion of modern copyright law and the balance with civil liberties. That is a wonderful development. Furthermore, it now seems that ACTA is dying following the remarks of European Commissioner Viviane Reding (she senses the political climate). One European country after another is delaying signing the treaty. In the three years since the “crisis” citizens have developed a fairly sharp bullshit filter to detect the kind of neo-liberal nonsense that ACTA is full of, and they will take no more. Like Software Patents it always takes awhile for the protests to get going but once they go representatives tend to choose the side of the people who can get them in a seat by voting in a few years.
Closer to home, the Brein lawsuit against internet providers Ziggo and XS4all to block The Piratebay generated a lot of media attention, it was a marketing campaign money can’t buy. Millions of Dutch people who had never heard of the site saw it discussed for several nights on the evening news. The forbidden always tastes sweet and an increase of users will be the logical consequence. Really, has anyone realistically suffered from the blockade that BREIN fought so hard for? Anyone? Bueler? The hugely successful operation against MegaUpload made worldwide headlines and caused a dip in filesharing….. which lasted all of 48 hours. And it produced advertising for such services and concepts on a scale that even Kim Dotcom could not have financed. So thanks for that.
The only result of all that copyright industry lobbying and lawsuits over the last 15 years has been an exceptionally rapid technological innovation towards an extremely decentralized media distribution. After the most recent attack, The PirateBay compressed its entire database to 90MB. If your phone has Bluetooth 2.0, you can share that with your neighbor during a subway ride. Because sharing is caring, right? As the great politicl philosopher Princess Leia once remarked to the Empire "the more you tighten your grip, the more systems will slip through your fingers".
There is still some muttering about ‘illegal downloading’ in the media and among astro-turfers. Except that it is not actually illegal in the Netherlands, not that facts have ever been a strong point of the copyright lobbyists. So let’s permanently eliminate any misunderstanding. There are two ways to look at copyright issues: legal and moral.
The Dutch law is simple. Legally you can make a copy for personal use, regardless of both the nature of the source and of the author’s wishes or intentions. "Illegal downloading” does not exist because … (wait for it) … it is legal. It is not "theft" because we would not need copyright is it was theft. We could just apply normal property rights. The very existence of the concept copyright indicates these are not the same. Anyone who still continues to peddle such nonsense is at best uninformed or a lawyer at DLA Piper. But I repeat myself.
A moral perspective on copyright is much more complex because we also have to consider the morality of the law itself (the fact that something is the law does not make it morally right – slavery and torture were once also permitted by law). In addition, it is important to consider how these laws are set up. What ACTA has very sharply highlighted is that modern copyright law is a snake pit of international lobbies, businesses and lying politicians, and deceived MPs and citizens who are deliberately kept in the dark.
Discussing copyright from a moral perspective without including this aspect seems absurd to me. What ACTA has demonstrated is that we shall no longer be bound by a moral law that has been democratically established or debated by our representatives. We have to determine what is moral and what is not in this area because the law clearly provides no such support.
And since the copyright industry is not about to enter into a real debate the outcome is inevitable: in ten or twenty years we will have an exchange between representatives of the remnants of the entertainment industry and the descendants of The PirateBay. It will resemble the famous statement of US Colonel Summers to his Vietnamese counterpart: "You know, you never beat us on the battlefield …". Whereupon Colonel Tu said, "That may be so, but it is also irrelevant."
Just as in any guerrilla war, the "insurgents" have won, and for the same reasons: they are smarter, more flexible, have broad popular support and all the time in the world. A sensible entertainment executive would do well to read some history books and learn some lessons about the conduct of guerrilla conflicts and the consequences of losing. Hint: the US struggled for a quarter of a century with its Vietnam syndrome, and the Soviet Union did not survive defeat in Afghanistan.
War over. We win. Music anyone?
SOPA; not our problem
<originally a Dutch Webwereld.nl column>
Yesterday was the big SOPA protest day. Wikipedia (in English), Boing Boing, Reddit and many other sites were blacked out. Other sites, and even google.com had one-line banners beneath the bar exhorting me to contact the US Congress. The link said: "millions of Americans Oppose PIPA and SOPA because these bills would censor the Internet and slow economic growth in the US". Even a classic song urges me "to call my congressman". But google.nl, did not show this – clearly indicating that it perceived the matter to be an internal American political problem.
In recent weeks there have been many calls for action outside the US against SOPA. These calls have been synchronized with outrage and protests as Bush Obama signed the NDAA anti-terrorism law. Under this law, anyone in the US "suspected" of involvement in "terrorism" (both nebulously defined) can be indefinitely imprisoned or even killed without trial or any other form of judicial review (think Stalin ’30). The anger itself is justified, but more than ten years too late. Indeed the only new provision in the NDAA is that the US can now treat its own citizens in ways that have been enforced against the world’s other 6.5 billion people since 2001.
The Big Brother legislation that has been introduced across the pond in the last ten years is now so extreme that even Oracle no longer wants to be a US-based company and European companies are beginning to avoid US providers over the Patriot Act. The whole country is obviously going through an Orwellian phase and so it is wise to keep a safe distance until it’s all over.
Even Michael Geist, otherwise a great source for information about ACTA, is not convincing. SOPA may perhaps be a broader North American problem but it still has little to do with the rest of us. Bits of Freedom in the Netherlands has a good overview of reasons to worry about a similar European SOPA-style legislation. Below are four points that explain why we shall not be badly affected:
"The Internet access to a site can be blocked." Annoying for Americans, but it won’t affect us. And Americans abroad can also easily bypass such a blockade through a VPN service, which is good for European VPN providers.
"Your domain name can be seized or sabotaged." Just avoid .com / .org / .net for your site/service, and steer clear of American DNS services and anything dependent on them – and that was an excellent idea long before SOPA. Your domain cannot be seized by customs and you will not be extradited and prosecuted for alleged violations of US copyright law.
“Payments to a website can be blocked." It’s really frustrating that there is an American credit card duopoly. However, Visa and Mastercard have already demonstrated with the Wikileaks case that no specific allegation of crime is required in order to be blacklisted. Fortunately, Europe has more and more local electronic banking systems that redress the balance.
"Websites will disappear from search results." It would be a shame if the American government really wanted to destroy Google, currently the best search engine, but it would also open the market for non-American alternatives beyond the reach of SOPA. Google could also clone itself, like Ikea – a Dutch foundation based in Zurich and Eemshaven datacenter and service its European customers.
This list confirms to me that we have become overly dependent of on US service providers (just like the software market!). This dependency is our real problem, not the current political shitstorm-of-the-month in the US. And finding alternatives and/or developing overseas partnerships is something we Europeans can proactively do for ourselves. That is where our focus should be.
America is broken, fundamentally broken. When an American politician cautiously suggests that the US might want to apply to itself rules it already imposes on others (the golden rule thing), he will be booed. This is the level of the debate leading up to the next "election" (I use the term advisedly – it’s more like bad reality-TV). The idea that it is still possible to influence US policy with a reasonable debate based on facts seems hopelessly naive. As George Carlin explained back in 2005, the US political system is too corrupt to deal even with the real interests of American citizens, let alone the interests of non-US citizens. US-based systems are now unsuitable for Europeans.
Smart Europeans can only wave goodbye and vote with their feet/wallets and DNS registrations. Surely Americans will understand that, it’s how they got started after all.
ACTA and SOPA are great!
<originally a Dutch Webwereld.nl column>
Socially aware people are, often justifiably, very good at moral indignation, but they just as often display a touching naivety. I recently watched with some surprise the American Occupy activists who were shocked (shocked I tell you!) as policemen (or university rent-a-cops) launched unprovoked attacks using batons and pepper spray.
It is indeed despicable that these officials use so much violence. But if people are still shocked by this in 2011, one has to wonder where they’ve been hiding for the last 10 years – have they not watched the news? Did they think that they could let stolen elections, illegal wars of aggression, shooting children with anti-tank weapons and the torture of innocent civilians happen without the ultimate consequence of their govenment using the same force against them?
But even the naive indignation of some Occupy activists about their government and its boot boys, is nothing compared to the childish surprise of the IT press about ACTA and SOPA. The copyright industry has for decades lobbied for the length of copyright to stretch to the end-of-time-plus-a-day extra.
Sony has no problems with infecting computers of their customers with what amounts to a virus. A torrent of writs has poured forth from the offices of copyright enforcement. Babies and the elderly without a PC, deceased persons, and even a HP laser printer have been falsely accused of copyright infringement (labeled as “theft” by the lawyers of the industry). Surely we all know the kinds of organisations we are facing now?
That’s why I’m happy that the Kafkaesque combo of ACTA / SOPA has become clear. Now ACTA and SOPA have almost been rammed through, at least we all know where we stand. The wolves have thrown off their sheep’s clothing and shown themselves for what they are: predators with no interest in our welfare. We therefore need not be quasi-shocked about the fact that some large companies behave like predators.
Now we have determined that we are dealing with predators, we can take action. Acting all shocked and angry once a wolf reveals himself in a kindergarten playroom is not an effective measure – he is a predator. If you want to prevent a bloodbath, you need to build a fence around the playroom – or perhaps even around the wolf.
If we want IT to work for us, we must ensure that the technology is designed around our interests rather than the interests of software vendors or copyright serfs. We need computers and network devices that do what we want them to do, even if that is not in the commercial interests of a handful of large companies or the political will of illegal government lobbyists.
For over 25 years the Free Software Foundation has been the only organization calling for this. During the last 15 years the debate about the principles of free software has been almost completely overshadowed by the much more business-orientated and pragmatic approach of the Opensource Initiative. The reason to found the Opensource Initiative was literally the ‘too principled’ attitude of the Free Software Foundation.
Meanwhile, all the things that the FSF has warned us about for so long have become the new and ugly reality. The complete lack of principle in discussing the applications of our technology is now starting to bite in very nasty ways. Almost all PCs (and I include Macs here), phones and game consoles have onboard functions that are not there for our benefit but for companies that want to earn our money. When you’re not in contol of your computer, is it still your computer / phone / console / router / etc … ?
This is an old political lesson: if you wait too long to protest, maybe you will no longer able or allowed to protest. This applies not only to addressing governments that start wars or the state stupidly bailing out the banks. This applies equally to the question of who is in charge of the computers and networks that we now all depend on. If we collectively do not demand principles as part of our tech, then we will get technology without them.
The ideas of the Free Software Foundation have never been more important. Not because proprietary software is worse (sometimes) nor because Free Software has become so much better (much!), but because our own systems, our digital home, is where we should all have have a say.
Only principled thinking (in addition to technical function) about our IT will keep the wolves from the door.
DIY privacy, because the law no longer works
<originally a Webwereld column – in Dutch>
Over the last few years it seems as though everything that is centralised fails. Governments fail to solve societal problems (or even just complete a successful IT project), central banks fail to monitor the behaviour of ordinary banks, IT companies fail to offer us solutions that are safe and respect our privacy somewhat …
Decentralisation works better: bittorrent, non-Western popular revolts, open source software, hacktivism and to a certain extent the Occupy movement. I’m glad Bits of Freedom and international counterparts such as the EFF exist because they put issues on the agenda that most of the over-50 politicians would not otherwise consider. In Berlin, the Pirate Party has over 9% of the seats in local government and is spreading rapidly across Germany.
But is all this really upholding our "rights"? Because despite all petitions, motions, actions and other initiatives our (digital) civil liberties are still evaporating. In the Netherlands it is virtually impossible to finish high school without buying Microsoft or Apple products, despite a long string of promises and agreements about this from our government. There are so many PCs that are controlled by cyber criminals that Microsoft had to set up a specific spring-cleaning for the Netherlands without user consent. This also makes it immediately apparent who really controls all these systems. Meanwhile, the government uses its own catastrophic Diginotar failure as a pretext for yet more government regulation of the online world.
The way the ACTA treaty brutally sweeps all issues of democratic control off the table clearly indicates where the interests of our Atlantic partners lie. SOPA is just the cherry on the icecream to show why we should no longer be dealing with the US-based IT services: Unsuitable.
It might be a better use of our time just to accept that our government is no (longer?) capable of resisting corporate power. Somehow or other a slow-motion palace revolution has occurred where the government wants to increase “efficiency” by relying on lots of MBA-speak and corporate management wisdoms that worked so well for the banking sector. The fact that the government’s primary function thereby evaporates does not seem to bother it. And meanwhile the companies themselves are apparently too busy making profits and fighting each other to worry about civil rights and other archaic concepts from the second half of the 20th century.
So rather than always trying to influence a system that ignores our interests, we can simply take care of ourselves and each other. This conclusion is not pleasant, but it gives clarity to what we have to do.
One good example is the Bits of Freedom weekly workshops on how to install encryption software and its publications that help people get to grips with these tools. The organisation should use its clout to get the slogan of "crypto is cool” on everyone’s lips. The NLnet Foundation should focus its energies on promoting the hip and user-friendly aspects of these pieces of software. Webwereld journalists should be looking for a modern, technical Deepthroat to make anonymous-advanced-OV-chip-card-hacking available to the general public.
Civil rights organizations and hacktivists can play a very different but probably even more effective role. Since 2006 I have ensured my own email privacy by no longer relying on the law, but by using a server outside the EU, SSL connection to it through a VPN tunnel entering the open Internet also outside the EU. And then I encrypt as many emails as possible individually with GPG. I suppose the fact that all those hordes of terrorists (who, our government asserts, are swamping Europe) have no doubt adopted such measures – for less than 20 Euros a month – making all the data retention measures a complete and pointless waste of resources.
What is possible now with email will soon be possible with telephony by using VOIP through international VPNs. This will even happen soon with mobiles (although your location information will remain a problem).
Then add an anonymous public transport card hack, a future version of Bitcoin for money transfers, and all you will need is a freshly installed Linux laptop (with an encrypted hard disk) and Bob’s your uncle. Just resist the temptation to put your whole life on Facebook and auto-tweet your GPS-data from you phone.
Then you can forget about any digital privacy legislation. You do not need government. You empower yourself as a modern citizen – better living through technology. Too bad it had to come to this – that old democracy concept seemed a really nice idea.
Update 2012: At Cryptoparty.org you can find places where citizens are teaching each other how to use privacy enhacing tools. If your locale is not on the list then add it and find people to get going where you live!
iTunes for ebooks
<originally a Webwereld column – in Dutch>
In 1996 I got my first MP3s. Storage was expensive, so I burned files onto CD-ROMs. There were 10 to 12 audio CDs on a CD-ROM. Conversion of an audio CD to a series of MP3s lasted hours using an encoder from the command line. They could only be played on a PC (or a very expensive laptop) so I had no good answer to the frequent question from family and friends: “why do you bother?”. Except that I was confident that bigger hard drives and smaller, cheaper laptops would evolve. I first had an audio PDA in 2000 – with a 256Mb memory card that could hold a few albums. I’ve forgotten what all that has cost, but probably quite a lot.
A year later, Apple came out with iTunes to make it easy to manage digital music collections. The first iPods with graphical software came along soon after, and MP3s were accessible to a wider audience. The result is that virtually all music can be downloaded from somewhere. It is up to the individual whether to pay for it, because downloading is not illegal in many countries and even where it is, there has been little noticeable effect on people’s behavior.
E-books and e-readers
In 2003 I bought a Zaurus PDA on which I could read books. I had those books first as a plain ASCII file on a memory card and there was no real reading app. It worked technically, but not realistically. The iRex e-reader that I bought in 2007 was the first proper device for reading books, although the ease of use and battery life left much to be desired. That first iRex was the equivalent of the first iPod – an expensive gadget with severe limitations. But what was really missing was an iTunes equivalent. A user-friendly piece of software with which non-technical book lovers could manage their collections. There are now many affordable e-readers and also a lot of people read on tablets and smartphones. I read on my own Android phone, which now has replaced my iPod.
Open-source iTunes
But the game-changer is the availability of an iTunes equivalent for e-books: Calibre (pronounced Kali-ber). Calibre is a desktop app on Windows, MacOSX and Linux, and brings the management of large collections of e-books within reach of most computer users. As with iTunes books can be sought directly from Calibre, bought at online bookstores, or downloaded from other sources. As a European who travels a lot, I am constantly frustrated by the fragmentation of the market for digital books (‘this e-book is only available in the U.S. and Canada for copyright reasons’). So I order it as a hardcover for the bookshelf and I download the digital version to fit with my 21st century lifestyle.
Calibre is very different from iTunes, in that it is completely open source and designed to serve the interests of the end-user. With Calibre it is therefore easy to convert the DRM e-books to other formats so that they can be read on devices other than those the the seller stipulates. Calibre also has several tools to help share e-books. It is possible to mail books directly from Calibre, which you can programme to individual addresses making the required format conversion. This is useful for friends, fathers and loved ones with a different brand of e-reader from you. It is also possible to export (parts of) your collection in the neutral ePub format or to share your library over a LAN via an integrated Web service.
Real change
The scene is set for a repeat of the rise-of-the-mp3-and-fall-of-the-music industry drama: cheap handy readers, software management and conversion, and a global infrastructure to share content. A widespread embrace of e-books will be much faster than MP3s because people have become accustomed to sharing and downloading, and because books are much smaller than music or video files (a novel is about 0.2-1 MB). On a 10 euro USB stick you can fit more books than most people will ever read in their lives. The last year has seen the diversity of books and quality of shared online collections increase dramatically. Just search the name of your favorite author with .torrent and bingo. You can also search for "epub" or "Kindle" and find wonderful collections and discover new authors.
When discussing books over the next 2-3 years we can expect a rehash of all the tired old arguments from the last decade about the digital distribution of music. The outcome of this discussion will probably be the same: ‘industry’ argues vociferously that it is not fair and that nothing more will be written without tough DRM enforcement. The public shrugs and downloads book collections anyway as more writers than ever write more books than ever and make more money than ever.
Discussion and reading
Calibre software, e-readers for less than $100 and The Pirate Bay will probably do more for the availability of books than the 2 Euros per capita the central government is willing to spend. I hope you all enjoy your reading!
For those who wish to pursue discussions on the legal and/or ethical aspects of downloading, I suggest you have a read of my earlier columns on copyright, to avoid repetition of arguments.
Waiting for the big one
<originally a Webwereld column – in Dutch>
Diginotar’s multiple IT failures in the public sector have been swept under the carpet. So far, nothing indicates that there will be any real change to the Dutch government’s overdue IT projects. During the hearing (mp3 – in Dutch) in the Lower House it was apparent that neither the government overseer OPTA or auditor Price Waterhouse Coopers believe themselves at fault, despite the fact that for years as regulators they have rubber stamped the work of Diginotar. The decisions of the PwC auditors were obviously good because "they are executed by responsible professionals". This will be heartening for all those Iranian citizens who are suffering the consequences of this (think of an unpleasant convergence of kneecaps and power tools).
But because of the chaos at Diginotar, we may never know for certain the full horror of those consequences. It is very simple for someone to take over an entire network and manipulate all the logs. The only thing we can really say with any certainty is that so far we have no reason to believe that IT security was any better in the past than the recently discovered FoxIT mess. The PwC audits are obviously not able to detect such a mess and OPTA apparently did not even look. Possibly Diginotar has been totally hacked for many years, and nobody noticed. A really smart spy or cyber criminal does his job and leaves no traces. The many detailed discussions about the exact scale and timeline of the hack have completely ignored this fact. From his grave Socrates is smiling at the idea that we only certainly know what we certainly do not know.
The most important question is surely: "how can we prevent such a critical part of our IT infrastructure from falling into foreign hands?". But this question was apparently not even on the radar of our regulators or MPs. Recent discussions about the USA browsing through our systems without judicial oversight make this question particularly pertinent. But perhaps I am somewhat naive to expect that my government to be both capable and motivated to protect the interests of its citizens.
Teamwork: it spreads the blame
Diginotar is yet another egregious example of a public IT function going terribly wrong at every conceivable level (selection, implementation, monitoring), and yet nobody being held responsible for the consequences. It is important to recognise that we shall probably never know how serious the real consequences were – especially for that unknown number of Iranian citizens. As a direct result, we must also recognise that we need to replace the people who did this “monitoring”and the "methods" they used. To continue to do the same and yet expect different results is one of the definitions of insanity.
Know nothing, do nothing
If a key IT organisation appointed by the government fails, it is down to a lack of crucial expertise in the government. Everything is privatized and the resulting lack of expertise is an unfortunate consequence of a principle of degraded policy-making. Instead of identifying and solving this lack of substantive expertise, it is dismissed as an immutable law of nature. "It just is" that the government has no employees who have relevant expertise to evaluate, manage and oversee IT projects (or evaluate and oversee the hired vendors). Simultaneously, our citizens trust that same government to properly assess the feasibility and implications of increasingly megalomaniacal IT projects – another symptom of institutional madness.
I therefore see the debate about any special protection for hackers as whistleblowers, however well intentioned, as only a symptom. The government needs to “own” the information, at least to have the right to ask questions and to independently evaluate the answers to these questions. Or should we simply give away control of our sea dykes and hope that a few public-spirited people will report the hole in a dyke on their Sunday off?
Nothing can be leaked that could change the way the people in The Hague deal with these problems. Nobody loses their head, even after such a mega-failure as Diginotar: and in comparison the implementation of both the electronic medical records and the public transport Chipcard pales into insignificance, butno doubt these projects also continue despite faillure after faillure.
What is necessary for a real breakthrough? Like I said in a debate about the EMR in 2005: an event that is too terrible to ignore. Because that is always what it takes in the Netherlands to shift our political-administrative system down a different path. It is always susceptible to the pressures of existing commercial interests or the idea of a couple of people losing their jobs. The complexity of Dutch society and the economy might itself bring about that change: something like a national breakdown of hospital systems, or something like an exploding refinery in the Rotterdam area. There are so many vulnerabilites to choose from.
I suspect there is a “sweet spot” in terms of deaths versus effective political impact. Somewhere between the Enschede fireworks disaster (23 dead) and the 1953 flood (1835 dead), so to speak. I share Rop Gongrijp’s analysis that after Diginotar nothing will change (because there were no deaths on TV). We are waiting for the big blow that is strong enough to make real change possible. Only then will there room for other people with more technical expertise, involving a much higher level of technical requirements and transparency of all the inter-related processes such as design, selection and implementation of new systems.
Perhaps a cruel cyber attack with cute little piglets?
It’s a trap!
<originally a Dutch column for Webwereld>
What is a document? It started as a flat piece of beaten clay, onto which characters were scratched with a stick. 8000 years later it was found and after years of study, archaeologists concluded that it said: ‘You owe me three goats”. ??
Through papyrus and parchment scrolls we arrived at mass production of paper and book printing in Europe in the 15th century. Our sense of the nature of a document is still derived from this previous revolution in information capture and distribution. When computers became commonplace as a tool to create documents, there was therefore a strong focus on applications to produce paper document as quickly and nicely as possible. The creation had become digital, but the final result was not fundamentally different from the first printed book in 1452.
Most word processors in use today cling to this concept. There are hundreds of functions for page numbering, footnotes and layout to achieve a legible final result – on paper. Many IT tools around the management and access of documents are directed to the concept of a digital document as a stack of paper. Ready to print for ‘real’ use. The modern ways of working together for various reasons no longer apply to a paper-oriented way of recording and distribution. Paper is static, local, and now much slower and more expensive to transport than bits. It is this combination of restrictions has led to new ways of creating documents where both the creative process and the end result is digital. A famous example is Wikipedia, the world’s largest encyclopaedia with millions of participants continually writing and rewriting about the latest insights in technology, science, history, culture or even the biography of Dutch folk singer Andre Hazes.??
In this new form a document is a compilation of information at an agreed place online. The URL is the document.
Most editors show their age not only by focusing on paper, but also by focusing on the concept that documents provide a discrete all-in-one storage medium. Word processing began before computers could communicate naturally through networks, and that legacy continues to shape the concept of a digital document.
From the binary formats of Wordstar (.ws), via WordPerfect (.wpd) and Microsoft Office (.doc), we are now using XML-based formats such as ODF and OOXML. The original purpose of the ODF was to break the stranglehold of the Microsoft binary .doc format, which was changed regularly and was therefore was difficult to support on systems other than Microsoft itself. Of course, that was exactly the intention. Once you acquire market dominance, why would you be interested in whether other systems are compatible with you when this gives you the competitive edge and profit margins of 65%?
To my amazement yesterday I read this report of a workshop designed to make OpenOffice compatible with the proprietary version of Microsoft’s OOXML file format. The operational wish for individual OpenOffice users to be compatible with .docx is understandable, as they are a minority in a landscape totally dominated by Microsoft Office, which now saves documents as .docx. If you choose not to use MS-office (for whatever reason) it can be a daunting task to save and read a document. Most users of word processors are unaware that, by using this format, they are making the lives of the minority difficult; they merrily continue to send out this digital asbestos.
For clarity, the .docx version of OOXML is not the same as the ISO version of OOXML – .docx is a proprietary file format, OOXML ISO is a standard. The certification of the ISO standard was itself nearly destroyed during the voting process by bribery and intimidation. The ISO standard has not been implemented by anyone yet, including Microsoft itself.
Solving problems of adoption of OpenOffice by pursuing the proprietary file formats of your opponent seems to me a disastrous path to go down. In the same way as .doc, the .docx format can be subtly changed with each version and servicepack ‘upgrade’ to avoid 100% compatibility. After all, actively tinkering with proprietary software to block alternatives not a new concept for Redmond.
Microsoft survives primarily on Windows and Office licences, even though it has doggedly been trying to conquer other markets such as mobile telephony. It would be rather naive to assume that such an organisation, with such a history, will sit back quietly while its cash cow is dismantled.
If the predictions about digital documents are true, it means we need new ways of working along with new tools. Page numbering and footnotes are irrelevant in hypertext in terms of the document-standard. Since the majority of documents produced by most users in most organisations are no longer than 1-3 pages and are usually using templates, a browser with plug-ins would be sufficient. This means that PCs are less important for the end users, who increasingly work just as well on a tablet. Tablets are very different to Pcs, but that is no barrier to rapid adoption. Contrary to popular claims, ‘different’ is not a problem if it is also sexy.
Aping your opponent is never a good idea. As a great strategist once said long ago (in a galaxy far away)::it’s a trap!