Date: 2008-05-08 11:12 Subject: Just Say No Security: Public Location: Not Jersey Mood: busy Music: Clutch - Black Umbrella

So, this is really late now; I blame work. And the battle may be lost, but the long, painful war of attrition is just getting started.

You have may have heard that there was some to-do about The ISO recently, particularly about the OOXML standard.

You may have also heard that it's the kind of obscure technical thing that only the most political Open Source geeks would be interested in. And perhaps you caught the article where the ISO appealed to the world at large to stop telling rude jokes about it, a surprisingly sensitive weak-sauce response for an International Standards Organization, especially the ISO itself.

Here's the thing, though... If you do any work with computerized documents at your business/organization/educational institution/library, you should definitely care about what is going down right now.

Lately, there's been a big push for government agencies and educational institutions to adopt "open standards" in for their electronic documents. It's a good idea for any organization that has to store a lot of documents (or other textual information); You want to rest assured that if some lame anticompetitive company stops supporting your document software, unfairly changes your licensing terms, or just plain goes out of business, you'll still have control of your information.

If your document standard is open, then you have all the necessary information to write your own software for working with those documents, or to convert them to a newer format. Even better, nobody can sue you for doing it, or even just for figuring it out yourself, as has been the case with certain other "closed" document formats.

So in short, it's a win-win for users who want their documents to stay readable in perpetuity, but kind of a lose-lose for companies that need to constantly charge you money to survive.

Which brings us to the OOXML issue. That ugly acronym is Microsoft's response to the demand for "open standards", and in their new style of choosing the most generically offical sounding name possible, stands for "Open Office XML". Especially funny when you consider that one of their biggest competitors in the office software arena is called "OpenOffice".

And, inexplicably, the ISO has chosen to approve the OOXML standard, proving that they do not understand the word "open", and also that they seem to have temporarily misplaced the concept of a "standard". There has been a great deal of protest and manly geek-tears shed over this debate, and the internets have not been kind to their decision.

Why all the fuss? Let me break it down for you:

OOXML is not Open: It turns out that just slapping the word "open" on the front doesn't count. Throughout the document, which is, itself "open", there are many references to copyrighted and trademarked technologies which are not included in the document. Thus it is impossible to completely implement the "standard" it describes. Though, that brings us to another important point...

OOXML is not a Standard: The whole point of a standards document is to officially define a concept so that everyone can agree on it. Like, say, health requirements for food storage, or the Unicode character set. More complicated things (for example, the geek-approved ODF or Open Document Format) may end up being a few hundred pages long, in order to describe them in detail. The beef here is that the OOXML standard is over 6000 pages long, while still failing to completely describe a standard. Now, you'd think that some part of that 6000 page tree-killing turd would actually be useful in practice, but if you compare their latest, greatest,XML documents from Office 2007 to the OOXML format, you will find a few errors. Like, 122,000, if you want to get nitpicky... That's more than two errors per page of specification, which is pretty impressive over such a huge file! So nobody, not even Microsoft themselves, is actually implementing this "standard". But the sheer volume is discouraging a lot of people (including the ISO, apparently) from bothering to read the whole thing. Arguably, it's just a marketing ploy; Microsoft wants to check off the "Open Standard" box when organizations are shopping for software, and has no serious intention to maintain a useable standard. Which certainly describes what we're seeing here...

"We Probably Own You": Paranoid linux geeks like myself haven't trusted Microsoft since the early 90s, and for good reason. But what about the rest of us? Since the OOXML format references secret, legally protected things, Microsoft has attempted to sweeten the (shit) pot somewhat with their "Covenant Not To Sue", which is more threatening than reassuring, and also their Open Specification Promise. Specifically:

"Microsoft irrevocably promises not to assert any Microsoft Necessary Claims against you for making, using, selling, offering for sale, importing or distributing any implementation to the extent it conforms to a Covered Specification."

So... If you attempt to do anything with an implementation of this "covered specification", they will not... use fake-ass imaginary legal terms against you? How about, I don't know, hitting you with a cease-and-desist, just plain suing you, or sending Steve Ballmer to your house to throw chairs and scream at your mom? Not only that, but, this whole agreement is carefully worded so that later versions (i.e. Office 2009) might not be covered by these "irrevocable promises"... Not to mention that while the "promise" is "irrevocable", the legal threads that tie it (even to the current OOXML) might not be. Nobody really knows, because they just made up most of this shit on the spot, and it's never been legally tested.

We already have an Open Document Format: It's called ODF, and it's already been approved for a while. It's also literally ten times shorter than the OOXML specification, and there are no hidden/secret/missing pieces, and yet it manages to achieve the same goals that the OOXML aspires (and fails!) to accomplish. It's also really open, in the sense that it is expressly free for anyone to use, and shall continue to be that way, and does not include any shady legal crapola about mega-corporations probably not suing you for using it. How about that! Not to mention that you can download actually open and free software that works with it.

Understandably, this has caused a lot of bad blood between the ISO and people who know what a "standard" is. They have also been mercilessly taunted by open source geeks (and other folks who know what the word "open" means in a software context), especially the poor guys who have to justify the ISO's behavior to the world.

And I really do pity those guys... It's like doing PR for Britney Spears. While there have been widely spread accusations of bribery, corruption, and extremely suspicious behavior in which the ISO voting boards of certain countries magically switched their votes from "No, with comments" to "Yes, without comments" in the bureaucratical wink of an eye, and decisions made by committees that hadn't actually seen the "standard", they don't reflect directly on the ISO organization itself.

Except maybe the part where the ISO is supposed to have some concept of what a "standard" is. You'd really think they'd have that one figured out by now.

So in that sense, I think all the old stale WWII style jokes about France surrendering aren't fair. But if you are going to make a crack like that, likening the individual ISO committees to post-invasion hookers giving it up to the Nazis would probably be more accurate. It's cool, we get called "Unix Beardies" for questioning gross criminal misconduct, so I'm sure they'll take it in good humor.

In short, the OOXML standard is tricksy and false in every sense of the word. If anyone in your organization is discussing it, dare them to read all 6000 busted-ass, legally threatening pages of it before making a decision.

Or just don't even step on that flaming bag of poo on your virtual doorstep at all; Get OpenOffice for free, or even WordPerfect Office if you insist on spending money for your office software. You'll still be able to read and write in MS Office formats, and you can start using an "open standard" that is actually both Open and Standardized.

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