A tale of two formats

Open stand­ards exist for a reason: they allow users on dif­fer­ent plat­forms, with dif­fer­ent soft­ware and dif­fer­ent ways of doing things to col­lab­or­ate and exchange inform­a­tion freely. Oft-​​quoted examples include the TCP/​IP pro­to­cols that allow com­puters across the Inter­net to talk to each other, and the pleth­ora of web stand­ards such as XHTML and CSS.

Almost by defin­i­tion, it is not pos­sible, nor desir­able, to have two formats that cover one par­tic­u­lar domain. And a war has been brew­ing in none other than in the doc­u­ment format arena: the battle between the Open Doc­u­ment Format (ODF) and Microsoft’s Open Office XML (OOXML) has just begun.

A stand­ards war is typ­ic­ally just that: two stand­ards com­pete against each other on tech­nical aspects, and the bet­ter one wins. This time, we have the mud­dy­ing effects of large com­mer­cial interests, and the pos­sib­il­ity of legis­lat­ive action. In recent months, legis­la­tion has been brought before sev­eral U.S. states (but defeated) to man­date the use of an open XML stand­ard for use by gov­ern­ment doc­u­ments; this has been widely inter­preted to mean man­dat­ing the use of ODF, because OOXML hasn’t quite yet been pro­mul­gated as an open standard.

It is a debate that doesn’t have a clear answer. The main piece of soft­ware that uses ODF is Open­Of­fice, which in my opin­ion is inferior to Microsoft Office (all things equal, and ignor­ing price). Microsoft Office, in its most recent incarn­a­tion, has demon­strated that it is a mature product; it is com­fort­able to use, and almost any­one can become pro­duct­ive with it almost imme­di­ately. While I’m not dis­put­ing OpenOffice’s abil­ity to cre­ate doc­u­ments and spread­sheets and what not, it feels like a cheap clone of what Office was about ten years ago; it feels clunky and wrong, and I just don’t like it. I’m sure oth­ers agree. People who know me will just argue this is just me exhib­it­ing my usual biases.

There are a num­ber of reas­ons, how­ever, that ODF is prefer­able to OOXML; Rob Weir (an IBM employee) presents his argu­ments quite lucidly. The primary motiv­a­tion behind the legis­lat­ive push towards man­dat­ing the use of an open format is the real­isa­tion that we need a way in which doc­u­ments can be kept for pos­ter­ity; if we rely on a closed, pro­pri­et­ary format, our des­cend­ants in, say, 100 years’ time, will no longer be able to open our doc­u­ments. I agree with this motiv­a­tion, and I sup­port open stand­ards because they increase inter­op­er­ab­il­ity; I recall the days when writ­ing web pages that behave reas­on­ably identical in dif­fer­ent browsers was an ardu­ous task.

This is where the dilemma lies. ODF is more open; it is a com­munity driven stand­ard that has a num­ber of open source writers/​readers. OOXML is, I sup­pose, open; how­ever, the format is pub­lished in a for­mid­able 6,000 page doc­u­ment, and its devel­op­ment will always be driven by a single com­pany – is that really open? (Even if it isn’t strictly open, I do note that hav­ing the format in a spe­cific­a­tion does enable doc­u­ment longev­ity.) How­ever, man­dat­ing the use of ODF prac­tic­ally means man­dat­ing the use of Open­Of­fice, because Office sup­port for ODF is rather poor (and is likely to be for the fore­see­able future). Sure, I’m mud­dy­ing the waters between formats and applic­a­tions, but cur­rently, the lead­ing office pro­ductiv­ity suite does not effect­ively use ODF. This is a prob­lem that must be taken into account in any push towards man­dat­ing the use of a par­tic­u­lar format.

One could argue that this is one of the evils of Microsoft’s mono­pol­istic empire – that we are so addicted to their products that we are unable to move off them. The win­ner will be the camp with the biggest will, and the biggest abil­ity to muster power­ful friends. Per­haps it will once again be the law, and not eco­nom­ics, that breaks up a mono­poly (c.f. AT&T). But there is one thing that is clear: in the end, there will be one format that pre­vails, for two is unsus­tain­able and impractical.

To fin­ish, it is slightly ironic that Microsoft is attack­ing open format legis­la­tion; their reac­tion is almost tan­tamount to deny­ing that OOXML is not open. As Rob Weir notes, Microsoft exec­ut­ives have a his­tory of mak­ing con­fus­ing state­ments; if they are actu­ally con­fused, that isn’t a good sign, and if they are con­fus­ing us inten­tion­ally, I’m sorry, but the com­munity isn’t that stu­pid. Microsoft shouldn’t be scared of open stand­ards; they should just look to how suc­cess­ful Adobe has been with PDF.

Related posts:

1. IFOSS Law Review