Information Manager Journal

Secrecy and open standards: do they mix?

This quote from IBM's Bob Sutor gives me the perfect opportunity to add to this longstanding debate:

"Whatever the outcome of the vote, that secrecy is one of the things that should change in the way IT standards are developed, Sutor said."

There is another recent example of real progress being made on a standard that probably isn't open if secrecy is a no-no. That's CalDAV, which I've written about recently over at Calendar Swamp.

CalConnect meetings, where the main interoperability demos occur, are invitation-only affairs (all members of CalConnect are automatically invited, and membership in CalConnect is open to anyone who can pay the required membership dues). CalConnect does release quite a bit of information about CalDAV and its progress at its Web site, but throughout the process, detailed info about the demos in each meeting are under nondisclosure, the CalDAV spec and related specs evolve while implementations and interoperability testing proceeds in parallel, and standards bodies such as the IETF consider the fruits of CalConnect's labors.

Is the proof in the process, or in the pudding? CalDAV isn't fully rolled out yet, and we can't assess its interoperability across an industry at this time, so I can't answer that question yet. And connecting calendars is a smaller problem than making all XML-based documents portable across all products and services that read and write such documents. But CalConnect seems to put the lie to Sutor's assertion that IT standards must be developed in the open. There's a lot of room for embarrassment of companies whose interim implementations of a standard happen not to work with other implementations. Open that up to wide scrutiny and the companies may just avoid working on the standard, slowing down progress substantially.

I don't have an answer, but blanket statements such as Sutor's strike me as noble aspirations, not ironclad requirements, for open standards to work.

Mozilla's Asa Dotzler takes aim at Apple

Former Wired Magazine cover-guy Asa Dotzler accuses Apple of not fully open-sourcing its WebKit Web browser and gets piled on in his blog's comments, including this comment by Mozilla's own Brendan Eich:

"Mozilla advocates risk looking holier than thou, or just whiny, when there's real work to do."

At some point, with all the money sloshing around, do leaders of Mozilla-type organizations start exhibiting more of the behavior or deportment of commercial software companies? MySQL may not be the only "community" drifting in that direction.

(None of which means Apple shouldn't be as open as possible.)

There's logging out, and then there's logging OUT

Here's an interesting idea...two-tier logouts:

I found this example at Linkedin.com. I wonder if this will become a widespread notion. In these days, could it hurt?

Zoho Writer: Rosetta Stone between ODF and OOXML?

Could a Web 2.0 service become a Rosetta Stone-like gateway between the two incompatible file formats of the next decade--ODF and OOXML? Maybe so. Zoho Writer just announced the ability to export documents to OOXML, and in response to my comment on TechCrunch, Sridhar Vembu of Zoho says it will also be able to import documents from OOXML soon: "Give us a few weeks!" Since the Zoho Writer Web site says it already reads and writes OpenOffice documents, this could be big news, provided it works well. Fortunately, I've got a good test document to try out.

Anti-patent page of MySQL, now part of Sun, goes dark

Go to the MySQL Web site and try to click on the MySQL anti-software patent page, and you won't find it. It's the other shoe dropping as MySQL today became part of Sun Microsystems, which like the rest of the commercial software and services industry, considers software patents a necessary evil.

I tried to find the old MySQL page via archive.org, and I couldn't find it there either. Has anyone out there saved a copy of what the page used to say? UPDATE: Peruse older versions of the missing page here, courtesy of archive.org.

At least, for now, MySQL is still listed as a partner at nosoftwarepatents.com.

UPDATE 2/27/08 9:41 p.m.: Zack Urlocker of MySQL emailed me this evening:

"Let me find out what happened.  We had some pages go missing during the rollout of new systems with the Sun integration earlier this week.  We're trying to fix it all though."

UPDATE 2/28/08 6:30 a.m.: This is what Zack sent me later last evening:

"Ok, as it turns out, many of the pages that were about our corporation have been taken down; e.g. while we can influence, say, the patent policies at Sun, we don't define them.

"That said, by what I know of Sun's patent policies, I think they are pretty decent."

Let's keep those clouds open

Ross Mayfield via Twitter:

"Ajax isn't the future. The future is Ajar -- 'open' apis that may shut at any moment despite the open monkier."

Ross speaks truly. Let's put some teeth back into that open word. Whether it's an open specification promise or some other convention, we need to hold these cloud computing platforms to some kind of standard of openness.

Is .docx a "major format" yet? Well?

This .docx thing continues to amaze me. On the eve of the super-important ISO Ballot Resolution Meeting for OOXML, for Microsoft to post a major background paper on its site in only .docx format strikes me as nothing less than arrogant. Don't believe me? Scribd, the hot new Web-based document viewing site, states that it supports "all major formats." Which does not (yet) include .docx.

Europe takes control

Glyn Moody says it best:

"In terms of oversight and regulation of the computer sector, the centre of gravity has shifted across the Atlantic."

Now would be a good time for the U.S. government to express its appreciation to the EU in some fashion. Even if that doesn't happen, U.S. taxpayers will benefit in the end.

UPDATE: In the meantime, it's ironic to note that a 102KB "announcement overview" is apparently only available as a .docx file, which I can't view in Firefox, or open in OpenOffice or older versions of Word.

UPDATE #2: I just happened to come across this November 2007 eWeek product comparison which notes that certain Linux distributions include variants of OpenOffice that support OOXML and (therefore) .docx files.

Bott: Blame the crapware, not Vista SP1

The original release of Windows Vista was certainly buggy. There were jokes about it even from speakers at this week's Microsoft Office Developers Conference. But as Vista Service Pack 1 comes out, could poor performance be laid at the feet of the "crapware" -- trial programs and advertising, also known as "craplets" by sources such as Wikipedia -- pre-loaded on PCs by their manufacturers? Ed Bott believes so. A clean install of Vista works wonders for performance, agreed many of his commenters. I think Bott's got a point here. Here's where Apple really shines -- they just don't allow this stuff -- and desktop Linux is vulnerable to the same thing happening as it grows in popularity. Does anyone know of a Web site that rates various PC manufacturers' crapware problems, and how easy it is to do clean Vista installs?