Information Manager Journal

Open Document Format: The sad truth

David Berlind has posted a massive chronicle of who said what to whom about the supposed emergence of CDF as an alternative to Open Document Format (ODF) and OOXML. I played a minor role in this saga when I spoke with Gary Edwards for Opening Move, back in April. This was before Edwards proposed CDF in place of ODF. If you haven't listened to our conversation, please do so, because the concerns Edwards raised about ODF (and OOXML) remain just as valid today. While I'm sad to see Edwards' more recent direction and assertions debunked in the press and the blogosphere, the greater tragedy is of two competing document standards -- ODF and OOXML -- now on seemingly irreversible paths to immortality, meaning we'll have translation issues between them around for several lifetimes to come.

LiMo Foundation on IT Conversations

My latest Opening Move podcast at IT Conversations is a chat with Morgan Gillis of the LiMo Foundation. LiMo stands for Linux Mobile, and anyone who's been watching moves by Google lately realizes just how important mobile Linux is becoming. 2008 will be a watershed year for mobile phones, but it remains to be seen just how open such phones will be, at least in the U.S., due to the power of those carriers controlling licensed spectrum. If they don't loosen their grip, 2008 could be yet another year that mobile innovation moves elsewhere in the world. LiMo Foundation will be at the center of that.

Open source mobility "wars": customers lose

If open source has simply become ammunition for IT platform wars, as even Dana Blankenhorn believes -- it's no wonder that his survey doesn't even consider the possibility that customers could end up being the winners. Customers have to demand more interoperability now or vendors and service providers will continue to build a myriad of new data silos that even open source will be hard-pressed to untangle.

Opening up software testing with video

The details of software testing inside big companies tend to be locked away in some vault. Novell is doing something different at its Better Desktop Web site. They've posted lots of videos of people using Mozilla Firefox, Evolution, Open Office, Banshee, F-Spot and other applications. The videos are organized by task -- that is, you can watch the way various people try to perform the same task, viewing their on-screen actions, their comments and their facial expressions all at the same time.

I applaud Novell for opening up the process of software testing in this fashion.

Sun's announcement at Oracle OpenWorld does not compute

As described by Dan Farber, Sun Microsystems this morning announced the Sun xVM platform, a way to run Windows, Linux and Solaris operating systems on top of Xen hypervisor technology. But the fact this was announced during a keynote at Oracle OpenWorld does not compute, because immediately following the keynote, I attended a session where Oracle's Ken Jacobs and other company officials stated that Oracle has no plans to certify the Oracle database or application stack to run on top of Sun xVM, opting instead to support Oracle's own newly-announced virtualization platform, also built on top of Xen.

(Confused yet?)

Curiously, no one asked about Oracle certification during the Sun press conference immediately after the Schwartz's keynote. Maybe it was the obvious question that didn't need to be asked. But I thought I saw more than one customer head shaking after they heard Jacobs lay it all out in the later session.

Sun, which is a Diamond Sponsor at Oracle OpenWorld, certainly got a bully pulpit to make their xVM announcement, and maybe that's all they wanted. But it's another sign of how strange things are in IT these days that Oracle wasn't actually on board with the announcement. When I asked Jacobs after his session, the best explanation he could offer is that Oracle customers could use xVM to run things other than the Oracle stack.

Strange times, especially for IT customers!

Google Java and Sun Java need to talk

At the Sun Microsystems press conference at Oracle OpenWorld, I was able to ask Jonathan Schwartz and Rich Green whether developers are going to be confused by having Google do its own thing with Java, outside the umbrella of Sun's Java Community Process. Rich's answer, essentially, was that Sun was talking to Google and that the two companies were very close to having some understanding about Java that would keep things simple.

But until the two companies work things out, it's good news for Windows Mobile, which certainly would make hay out of having a big fork in widespread adoption of the Java development platform on handsets, between Sun's Java and Google's Android.

If Microsoft ever truly opened up and modernized Windows Mobile, Java might be in trouble. Microsoft's lack of effort here is Java's saving grace.

Open Handset Alliance won't dictate much

Listening to the conference call now in progress about the Open Handset Alliance, it's clear to me that this is an open source play and not an open standards one, in the sense that the forthcoming work of the Alliance won't be under enough control that certain minimum requirements be satisfied by any one handset using that code. For instance, the code (licensed under Apache v2) could be used to build a completely locked-down handset. Also no one is dictating inclusion of certain functions -- for instance, offline access to Web-based applications as might be built using Google Gears or an equivalent.

There's nothing inherently wrong with making these decisions, but they will have long-term effects on the kinds of mobile devices this venture will yield. I'm not saying we won't see completely open mobile phones with offline access to all Web apps, but customers will still have to demand them, engineers will still have to build them, and sales channels will still have to deliver them. That much hasn't changed with today's announcement.

It does remind me how much standards, even open ones, often dictate what a technology must do. There's much more work to be done on open standards for mobile devices.

Open Handset Alliance announced

The first Open Handset Alliance news is out. I'll be watching this quite closely.

Second thoughts on OpenSocial

Yeah, I should have asked for more from Google -- like putting the APIs in the Creative Commons perhaps? Joe Wilcox describes just how closed OpenSocial is:

"What's open about the APIs released by Google? There is no open standard here for enabling connections among disparate service. The APIs are Google's intellectual property."

First thoughts on OpenSocial

Standards are good. Open standards are best. OpenSocial looks like an open standard. After studying them for five years, I feel like I can recognize one.

While developers feverishly download and play with the new OpenSocial APIs, here's my most fervent hope for OpenSocial. Advertisers want to fund Web sites so they can target us with ever-more-personalized advertising. What hardly anyone ever talks about is a way for customers to opt out of advertising entirely, yet enjoy the open standards and technology being built on the Web today.

Maybe when all the dust settles, OpenSocial and standards like it will enable subscription-based Web services that are both interoperable and as private as we want, up to and including shielded from the prying eyes of advertisers. That would enable another whole new generation of services, since I am certain that many customers are less than eager to hand over some of their most private personal and corporate information and habits, just to easily share some contacts, calendars or photos.