Showing headlines posted by Andy_Updegrove

A Federal Court has found Qualcomm Corporation guilty of the same type of conduct for which the FTC slammed memory technology maker Rambus: failing to disclose its patents in a standards process, only to assert its "submarine" patents after that standard had been widely adopted.

The world of open source has its SCO suit, and the world of open standards has its Rambus mess. Rambus is a memory technology developer that the Federal Trade Commission has ruled created an illegal monopoly by "gaming" the standard setting process. Last Friday, Rambus won a tactical victory that will allow it to continue to charge its current royalties, so long as the part the FTC deems to be excessive goes into an escrow account, until an appeal by Rambus' is won or lost.

Deval Patrick, the Commonwealth's new governor, yesterday introduced a $1.47 billion "emergency" bonding bill, intended to cover a broad range of local and statewide projects, including a measure of funding for upgrading the state's IT infrastructure. This is the funding that State CIOs Peter Quinn and Louis Gutierrez resigned over - and that the legislature failed to provide last year. But the new bill would only restore a fraction of what is needed.

Citizens of modern societies lead highly regulated lives. Whether as individuals we agree or disagree with the degree to which governments control our existence, we nevertheless benefit from a myriad of laws and regulations that seek to ensure our safety and welfare. The range of regulation is breath taking, encompassing the purity of air and water, the quality of food, the sanitation of towns and cities, the safety of transportation systems, and the delivery of utilities and other essential services, to name just a few.

Someone was kind enough to send me the package of materials distributed by ISO/IEC JTC 1 earlier today to its members. The package contains each of the responses filed during the ISO Fast Track Contradictions period for Ecma 376, the specification based upon Microsoft's OOXML formats, as well as the responses prepared by Ecma to those responses. As earlier reported, they are strongly negative.

The big news of the day is that a legislator in California has decided that it is time to convince his colleagues that California should become the latest U.S. State to get on the open formats bandwagon. If the bill advances, it will the third such pieces of legislation to have been filed in recent weeks (the others are in Texas and Minnesota). The full text appears at the end of this blog entry.

Those who are following government initiatives to mandate the use of open standards and/or open source will be aware that Denmark is one of the countries that has been in the legislative forefront. Here's an update of what's new.

Usually, representatives of national bodies can go about their business without too much fear of being molested by multinationals pushing their favorite standards. But when the economic stakes are high enough, standards committee members can become the subject of more attention than they wish, and to feel like citizens of Iowa during a presidential year.

Perhaps the most significant news this week in the battle between OOXML and ODF was Micorosoft's decision to escalate the air wars by sending IBM an open letter "valentine" yesterday, posted at the Microsoft Interoperability Web page.

Given that there has been a fair amount of information, disinformation, and supposition flying around, I thought that I should share some additional details that I've learned relating to the contradictions received by JTC 1 regarding Ecma 376 (nee Microsoft OOXML).

One of the things that you learn early when you blog is to ignore the flames, or at least try to. Lots of people will assume that you're a jerk (a/k/a you think something they don't), or that you have all of your facts wrong. They can often get pretty harsh about it, too. Still, you have to keep in mind that you're not going to always be right, and own up and take it in the chops like a grownup when you get called out.

Just a few minutes ago, Sun announced that it would make a "preview" version of its Office to ODF plugin in "mid February," with the full version to follow "later this spring." Plugins will be available for use with both Sun's StarOffice as well as the open source OpenOffice.org office suite. The announcement comes three days after Microsoft announced the immediate availability of its Office to ODF plugin at SourceForge.

With Microsoft's OOXML formats at last under review by Joint Technical Committee 1 (JTC1) of global standards bodies ISO and IEC, things are heating up dramatically in the battle between ODF and OOXML. When the deadline for the one month contradictions period of the ISO/IUEC Fast Track closed on Monday afternoon, JTC 1 had received responses from a total of nineteen national bodies, with most or all of those responses including formal "contradictions" under applicable rules.

Three and a half years after 9/11, I remain astonished at how few of the comparatively easy and essential defensive tasks we've accomplished, in comparison to the vastly expensive (and often unsuccessful) initiatives that we have mounted.

As those who are following Microsoft's OOXML formats through the standardization process will know, those formats are now in the "contradiction" phase in JTC 1 at ISO/IEC. Or, so it would seem, they are in the "so, what is a contradiction, anyway?" phase in JTC1.

The most interesting news this morning is that Adobe is contributing the entire PDF specification to the open standards process. According to the Adobe press release (reproduced in full at the end of this post), the specification will be contributed to AIIM, which currently administers those component parts of the PDF specification that Adobe had previously made available for standardization. When AIIM has completed the preparation work and its membership has adopted the new material, it will be submitted to ISO.

What do global wiki projects, assistive technologies announcements, efforts to buy Wikipedia access, major platform announcements, simultaneous competing toolkit releases, and public calls to arms to defend Europe against being "railroaded" all have in common? They're all part of just one week's head-butting between the proponents of ODF and Microsoft, as OOXML embarks on its effort to become an ISO/IEC-adopted standard (a status ODF already enjoys).

Sunday afternoon, the Free Standards Group (FSG) signed an agreement to combine forces with Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) to form a new organization – The Linux Foundation. The result of this consolidation will be to dedicate the resources of the combined membership to "accelerate the growth of Linux by providing a comprehensive set of services to compete effectively with closed platforms."

OOXML, the Microsoft Office XML-based formats, are now in the adoption queue at ISO/IEC.  That process takes six months -  the same amount of time that the PAS process takes (the route used by OASIS to submit ODF to ISO/IEC) – but has two steps rather than one, although the practical result is much the same. During the first one-month step, any member may submit "contradictions," which, loosely defined, means aspects in which a proposed standard conflicts with already adopted ISO/IEC standards and Directives. 

When disruptive technologies come along, standards need to evolve in parallel, so that they are there when new products hit the shelf. The result can be standards "swarms" that provide multiple, overlapping solutions to choose from. Ultimately, the fittest survive and things settle back into a more stable (and limited) ecosystem.