August 2007

On September 2, the comment and voting period will close on ISO/IEC DIS 29500, the draft specification based upon Microsoft’s Office Open XML formats (OOXML). The Linux Foundation (LF) has received questions from outside its membership regarding its position on adoption of OOXML in its current form as a global standard. In sum, the Linux Foundation calls upon those National Bodies that have not yet cast their votes to vote “No, with comments.”

By way of context: Central to the mission of the Linux Foundation is the creation of standards that become widely adopted. In recent years, the Linux Foundation (then known as the Free Standards Group) successfully submitted the Linux Standard Base (LSB) to ISO/IEC for adoption through a process similar to that now being employed to review OOXML. The LSB has now been implemented by all major distributions of Linux.

As a result, the Linux Foundation is not only familiar with, but has a vested interest in the preservation of the validity and integrity of the global standards adoption process. When that process works well, everyone wins. The modern world has become utterly dependent upon technology, and therefore upon the ability of standards organizations to provide interoperability and other open standards as well. With the conversion of paper documents to digital formats, the world has also become utterly dependent upon the ability of those documents to be accessed in the future. Creation of documents in proprietary formats at best jeopardizes that ability, and at worst guarantees that easy access in the future will be impossible.

Consequently, the Linux Foundation believes it is important for effective and robust document format standards to be developed, and for those standards to be universally adopted. In order for universal adoption to be achieved, it is equally important for the process that creates those standards to be above reproach.

More specifically, the Linux Foundation supports the activities of the Linux Desktop Architects and their work enhancing the Linux desktop. (You can find their statements on OOXML here.) The Linux Foundation believes that Linux on the desktop will become increasingly widely deployed, and therefore the availability of robust, widely adopted – and easily implemented – document format standards are of great importance to those that develop, sell and use Linux in this way.
Finally, the Linux Foundation notes that there already exists an ISO/IEC standard intended for a similar purpose – the Open Document Format – that has been implemented in at least a dozen products, both open source as well as proprietary. These products have been developed and released by multiple vendors (including several Linux Foundation members). While the current voting in ISO/IEC JTC1 is based upon the technical merits and issues relating to OOXML, the Linux Foundation believes that the marketplace would be better served by all vendors – including Microsoft – uniting around the implementation and further development of a single, common specification. Given the existence and prior ISO/IEC JTC1 adoption of ODF, and the fact that OOXML (which is a new specification) will require translation of existing documents as well, the Linux Foundation believes that the better platform for that effort would be ODF.

The Linux Foundation offers the following advice to those that are still considering how to vote on ISO/IEC DIS 29500:

1. The OOXML specification is extremely lengthy. Based upon all that we have been able to learn, the review period that has been allowed is insufficient to provide confidence that all issues that may need to be resolved before OOXML could meet minimum quality standards. Accordingly, the Linux Foundation believes that adoption of OOXML, after addressing only those issues that have been identified to date, would be unwise.

2. That said, there have already been hundreds of issues that have been raised. While some of these issues are minor, many are not. The Linux Foundation believes that OOXML is simply not mature enough at this point to be granted approval as an ISO/IEC standard. Many, but not all, of these issues have been summarized here.

3. ISO/IEC standards are supposed to reference other globally adopted standards where those standards exist. In the case of OOXML, many proprietary Microsoft specifications have been referenced. In some cases (e.g., language codes, vector graphics), Microsoft has used its own, internal codes and specifications rather than already existing, publicly available alternatives. This not only violates ISO/IEC rules, but also puts in question whether implementers can fully implement OOXML without infringing intellectual property rights (IPR) of Microsoft. Will those IPRs be available? If so, upon what terms will they be available? The answers to these questions appear to be currently unknown.
4. OOXML is specific to Windows and other Microsoft products. It is uncertain whether OOXML-based documents will be easily created, saved, and opened using other operating systems – like Linux – and applications, with or without converters or translators. An international standard should be created in the first instance to be neutral to all operating systems and other products.

For all these reasons and more, the Linux Foundation calls upon those National Bodies that have not yet cast their votes to vote “No, with comments.” Those comments should reflect their best, neutral, technical judgment, based upon OOXML in its current form. Only by doing so, we believe, can both the future availability of documents, but the integrity of the standard setting process be assured.

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When I talk to family and friends outside of the technology business about what I do, I often get reactions like this, “I’ve never seen or used Linux. It’s just used by technology geeks, right?” My reply? “I’ll bet you a thousand dollars you’ve used Linux. You just haven’t realized it.” I then ask them the following:

• Do you use the Internet? Every time you use Google or Amazon.com you’re using Linux.
• Have a Sony Playstation 3 or Tivo in your living room? You’ve got Linux.
• Have an account at a major bank or a financial services company? Chances are they use Linux (often times on a mainframe) to run your account.
• Use a mobile phone? Chances you either are or will soon be using Linux. Motorola and Palm, for instance, are both using Linux in their new models.

The examples go on and on. Linux has made the progression from hobby to ubiquity in a relatively short time. Why? Because of it’s scalability and open-ness, Linux is used in more types of devices than any other OS in history. It’s distributed and open development process allows it to be customized quickly for these special purposes.

Now we see recent news that Singapore Airlines (my favorite airlines btw) is putting a personal computer running Linux in every seat of their newer planes. This will be a great way for people to explore Linux for the eight to fifteen hours of flight. (I was going to say “painlessly explore” but then thought about those eight to fifteen hours and revised my sentence.)

This is another example of an innovative company using Linux not to reduce costs, but to add more functionality and differentiate itself against the competition.

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One of our successful programs here at the Linux Foundation is also one of the least well known — at least in the United States. Three times a year, the Linux Foundation Japan office brings in leading Linux luminaries to present and interact with local senior software developers. The goal? To increase open source participation by talented Japanese developers. The result? Even though it’s not an exact science, accepted patches from Japanese developers have been rising over the last years.

In July, I was lucky enough to attend the Japan Symposium (organized by the LF Japan office) and work with the program committee to get two very talented developers to participate: Paul Menage and Jonathan Corbet. Paul talked about the process containers patch he has done at Google, while Jonathan updated the crowd on the Linux Platform Weather Forecast and how best to get involved and contribute to the Linux project. We also learned about the fault injection framework Akinobu Mita has created.

Day 2 of the Symposium was a smaller gathering of key engineers from NEC, Fujitsu, Hitachi, NTT and other leading technology companies in Japan. They discussed their projects and asked Paul and Jon for their feedback.

Jonathan excellently covered the trip in LWN.net here. I especially like these points:

“The key to building a community and keeping it together is good communication. By bringing in community developers, the Japan Symposium certainly succeeds in raising the level of communication with the Japanese community. There is no better way to learn about how a community works than to talk with those who are in the middle of it. This series of events might just be part of why contributions from Japan appear to be on the rise. A less obvious but equally important point is this: communication goes both ways. Any speaker who attends this event can only go away smarter, having learned something about how the wider world sees free software. That, too, can only be a good thing.”

Couldn’t say it better myself, Jonathan. We are planning another Symposium in Japan in November and are investigating other similar events in China and Korea. I think this two-way dialog is extremely helpful for the global community.

You can view images from the conference here.

Popularity: 16% [?]