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- <title>FSFE - Questions for Microsoft on open formats</title>
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-
- <h1>Questions for Microsoft on open formats</h1>
-
- <p>
- Originally published on BBC, 2007 July 11th.
- </p>
-
- <p>
- After Microsoft announced it would work with the UK National Archives to
- help open old digital document formats, Georg Greve and Joachim Jakobs,
- of the Free Software Foundation Europe, question the US giant's motives.
- </p>
-
- <p>
- Today's customers drive the technological development of tomorrow. This
- insight is common sense.
- </p>
-
- <p>
- But when the same customers pay one and the same company for first
- creating a problem and then pay them again for solving that problem, most
- people would expect the customer to be dissatisfied. Although, at least
- some people seem to be pleased.
- </p>
-
- <p>
- The problem: Microsoft dominates the desktop and office market
- with a share of more than 90%. Any document stored in their proprietary
- binary formats and especially every document shared between multiple
- people strengthens the monopoly and harms competition, economy and
- society as a whole.
- </p>
-
- <p>
- The more widely these formats are being used, the higher the network
- effect forcing others into the same dependency - just as it happened to
- the UK National Archives.
- </p>
-
- <p>
- What happened: Microsoft asked the UK National Archives to invest
- in a solution that would grant access to their legacy data.
- </p>
-
- <p>
- Only last week BBC News reported on Mr. Gordon Frazer, managing director
- of Microsoft UK, who voiced concern that customers could lose their own
- data: "Unless more work is done to ensure legacy file formats can be read
- and edited in the future, we face a digital dark hole."
- </p>
-
- <h3>Honest statement</h3>
-
- <p>
- This is a surprisingly honest statement from a company that is the
- largest provider of incompatible and undocumented legacy file formats in
- the world.
- </p>
-
- <p>
- The best solution Microsoft can apparently offer is to "emulate" the old
- versions of Windows under the current version of Windows Vista.
- </p>
-
- <p>
- Indeed some libraries and museums may want to offer an idea of the
- previous ages of computing, and not all of them may want to offer the
- fully authentic experience of running it on the old hardware to get the
- original "look and feel" of bygone times.
- </p>
-
- <p>
- But are the UK National Archives primarily a museum dedicated to
- preserving the original experience of ages and technologies long past? Or
- are they focused on archiving the knowledge, thoughts and ideas of the
- generations we build upon?
- </p>
-
- <p>
- The broad audience may not want to read Caesar in the hand writing of a
- particular scribe on the original clay tablets or skin.
- </p>
-
- <p>
- Images of them would normally be sufficient, although indeed most people
- would prefer a transcription on paper or screen may be sufficient.
- </p>
-
- <h3>Good translation</h3>
-
- <p>
- Even more people are probably served best with a good translation. File
- formats are the equivalent of the transcription, they encode the original
- writing into a form for storage.
- </p>
-
- <p>
- This idea is not new. Humankind has always sought to preserve its
- knowledge, as is documented by clay tablets, scrolls and cave paintings
- of ages long past.
- </p>
-
- <p>
- But while the storage medium can last for a very long time, sometimes the
- meaning is lost because the key to the information is lost.
- </p>
-
- <p>
- In modern terms: We no longer know the encoding used for the cave
- paintings.
- </p>
-
- <p>
- Digital information could potentially be stored without loss of quality
- for a very long time to come.
- </p>
-
-
- <p>
- But without knowledge about the encoding, our documents will become a
- meaningless series of ones and zeroes to future generations, just like
- cave paintings are too often meaningless bits of colour on stone to us.
- </p>
-
- <p>
- The best way to preserve the encoding is to spread it as far as possible,
- to make it a public good that is preserved with the same or higher
- diligence than the encoded information itself.
- </p>
-
- <p>
- At best, there is currently only one company that knows exactly how it
- has implemented its proprietary legacy file formats.
- </p>
-
- <p>
- If Microsoft had used Open Standards from the moment it was founded in
- 1975, this problem would not exist.
- </p>
-
- <p>
- In fact, the users of GNOME Office, Koffice or OpenOffice.org would have
- no problems reading documents written by users of Microsoft (MS) Office.
- </p>
-
- <p>
- As it is, the stability of the encoding completely depends on the future
- existence and behaviour of one company.
- </p>
-
- <p>
- Thanks to the co-operation of many companies that find themselves in
- strong competition, but understand the necessity of preserving the
- encoding, there is an Open Standard for office documents: the
- "OpenDocument format" (ODF), which is maintained and further developed by
- OASIS, an international e-business standardisation organisation, and has
- been certified by the International Organisation for Standardization
- (ISO).
- </p>
-
- <h3>Serious doubts</h3>
-
- <p>
- Microsoft has said it has its own open format, called MS-OOXML. But there
- are serious doubts whether MS-OOXML can be considered an Open Standard:
- Like a Russian doll, it wraps a number of legacy formats like "Word95" or
- "Word6", which are not publicly available and can only be implemented by
- Microsoft.
- </p>
-
- <p>
- Another issue is that OOXML may be subject to patent claims. Ultimately
- the development of the format depends completely on the future existence
- of one company. Can we bet our future on Microsoft to exist in 4007?
- </p>
-
- <p>
- The impact of such dual standards was recently explained by Open Forum
- Europe, a business association with members such as Fujitsu Siemens,
- Hewlett Packard, IBM, Intel, Novell and Sun.
- </p>
-
- <p>
- Their conclusion was to back ODF: "Multiple Open standards in the area of
- Interoperability are unwelcome, costly and impractical for both users and
- suppliers, and will be rejected by the market."
- </p>
-
- <p>
-
- The public needs to understand: As long as only Microsoft can write
- software that will be able to make use of the full extent of the
- predominant office file format, Microsoft will remain the predominant
- vendor for lack of alternatives and competition.
- </p>
-
- <p>
- In order to make MS-OOXML the predominant file format, Microsoft is now
- seeking approval through ISO for its format, expecting its market
- dominance and global lobbying efforts to coerce a sufficient amount of
- national standardisation bodies into approving MS-OOXML at ISO.
- </p>
-
-
- <p>
- We have laid down six questions we want Microsoft to answer - but the key
- one is this: Why did and does Microsoft refuse to participate in the
- existing standardisation effort?
- </p>
-
- <h2>Related reading</h2>
-
- <ul>
- <li><a href="/documents/msooxml-interoperability.html">Interoperability woes with MS-OOXML</a></li>
- <li><a href="/documents/msooxml-idiosyncrasies.html">DIS-29500: Deprecated before use?</a></li>
- <li><a href="/documents/msooxml-questions.html">Six questions to national standardisation bodies</a></li>
- <li><a href="/documents/msooxml-converter-hoax.html">The Converter Hoax</a></li>
- </ul>
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