Sun to plug OpenDocument to global summit
Published:31-October-2006
By BR staff writer
Sun Microsystems Inc and like-minded organizations will promote the use of open standards, including the OpenDocument Format much feared by Microsoft Corp, at the Internet Governance Forum summit this week in Athens, Greece.
The company, along with supporters including IP Justice and the Consumer Project on Technology, will urge governments to adopt procurement practices that recognize open technology standards as important, and forbid buying only proprietary technology.
The inaugural IGF meeting, which kicked off yesterday, is being attended by about 1,500 members of international governments, civil society organizations, private companies, academics and media. The forum was created by the UN-backed World Summit on the Information Society a year ago.
Today, Sun and others are expected to announce the formation of the "IGF Dynamic Coalition on Open Standards", an apparently ad hoc coalition of organizations that support open standards.
This DCOS, which is not believed to yet have any kind of formal IGF or intergovernmental endorsement, will present two papers for discussion at a workshop in Athens on Thursday.
The papers, available for viewing now at cptech.org, argue that adopting open standards is useful to spur adoption of the internet in developing countries, and that open standards are currently "in jeopardy" due to vendors plugging proprietary interfaces.
"The social value of interfaces has increased; so has their business value," the paper says. Software patents and proprietary APIs "are now being used to manipulate the direction of the network effect and to thwart widespread interoperability of computer programs" and this, the paper says, "will be particularly harmful to developing countries."
Another paper to be discussed deals specifically with government procurement practices. It addresses government as tech buyer, tech policymaker and tech producer, and in each context urges governments to support open standards.
Governments should "ban procurement policies from requiring compatibility with proprietary technologies or proprietary ICT standards" and "ban procurement policies from specifying particular brands, manufacturers, or products", the paper says.
"'Openness' is best judged by the number of competing, fully substitutable implementations of the standard," the paper suggests.
While the two discussion documents presented by CPTech do not specifically call out the OpenDocument Format, the document format used in Sun's StarOffice and the open-source OpenOffice.org, it is pretty clear that ODF is a priority for the DCOS coalition.
For well over a year supporters of ODF have been pursuing governmental support for the standard as a key stepping stone into more widespread adoption. But they've faced opposition from Microsoft. Redmond has substantial lobbying clout, and a $3bn-a-quarter Office business.
The state of Massachusetts losing its chief technology officer after a public argument about mandating ODF support in procurement, is probably the most prominent example of governmental support for ODF giving Microsoft the heebie jeebies.
CPTech's James Love blogged about governments' reluctance to adopt ODF earlier this month.
"Many people are nervous about these issues, because Microsoft is investing millions to defeat them, and to attack personally government officials who Microsoft sees as too friendly to open standards, and to reward politicians and government officials who back Microsoft," he wrote.
CPTech is the small non-governmental organization founded 11 years ago by veteran consumer rights activist and former US presidential candidate Ralph Nader. It is currently headed by Love, who is also a prominent blogger at the Huffington Post.
So many governmental IT policymakers in the same building as corporate interests and issue-based groups is obviously a rare opportunity for any NGO or IT vendor that has an interest in promoting their view of the industry's future.
While much of the discussion at the IGF summit so far has focused on naming, addressing and internationalization (see separate story), the meeting does have development, capacity building, openness and access as some of its key memes.
The DCOS coalition may have one influential ally in the form of Vint Cerf, the co-inventor of TCP/IP, Google vice president and chairman of ICANN. While he does not appear to be directly involved in Thursday's workshop, he advocated similar beliefs during prepared remarks at the IGF opening ceremony in Athens yesterday.
"Digital documents often need to be interpreted by special software packages to be rendered in understandable form," he said, according to an IGF transcript. "Steps are needed to assure that the information we accumulate today will be usable not merely decades but centuries and even millennia into the future."
While Cerf very well may not have been directly advocating open standards such as ODF, the idea of preserving data access far into the future is one of the values of open standards frequently cited by ODF supporters.
The Thursday workshop will have speakers including: Brazil's secretary of information technology Rogerio Santanna; Magdy Nagi, head of IT at Egypt's Library of Alexandria; CPTech's Love, Eddan Katz of the Yale Information Society Project, Robin Gross of IP Justice, Susy Struble of Sun, Daniel Dardieller of the W3C and Georg Greve of the Free Software Foundation Europe.
