Once More unto the Breach

IBM Joins OpenOffice.org (The Quick Analysis)

It's official — IBM has joined the OpenOffice.org project. [There's good reporting and analysis from Andy Updegrove and Redmonk's Stephen O'Grady.  Update (12 Sep): Here's Andy's interview with IBM's Doug Heintzman, Director of Strategy for the Lotus division.] 

Here's the back of the envelop analysis.

From the OpenOffice.org community perspective, I'm guessing Louis Suarez-Potts (OO.o Community Manager) is feeling good to get a new injection of code/energy.  This is great for the community.  The OpenOffice suite keeps getting better and better, but new blood with new code could provide a much needed boost.

Overall Sun Microsystems is probably [very] happy IBM is supporting OpenOffice.org directly.  This is a much better situation than IBM building some form of ODF development platform inside Eclipse.org to enable ODF over OOXML, with OpenOffice.org hit as collateral damage.  [This would be sort of ironic since Eclipse helped to pull the Java centre-of-gravity away from Sun, and Visual Studio was collateral damage (or icing depending upon one's perspective).]  Collaboration is the much stronger market play here for Sun and IBM, and most importantly OO.o users and customers.

From the IBM perspective, this is brilliant business as usual.  ODF is the global leverage they need to crack open the Microsoft Office marketplace.  (I've written ad nauseam that ODF and Microsoft Office is just another example of Christensen economics in motion.  Microsoft has over-delivered on Office.  They mistakenly think more innovation faster is the answer.  Let the chips fall where they may.)  IBM will likely use OpenOffice to front-end Lotus and the Domino server product lines, and anchor their business messages to their customers's needs around standards and open source software, much the same as they do with Eclipse and the Websphere developer world.  Their claims are that much stronger with this announcement.

Sun gave Gnome a huge leg up about four years ago when they contributed a wealth of their accessibility technology R+D.  IBM will now contribute the same into OpenOffice.org.  It means they can easily manage their way through U.S. government procurement regulation in this space.  Once again brilliant IP management from IBM, and good for OO.o users and customers.  [For those that have heard me present, this is exactly what I mean about having a mature intellectual asset strategy, and being generous exactly in order to play to win.]

A strengthened OpenOffice.org will help Novell immeasurably to keep their distance with Microsoft on the desktop.  Novell has done a lot of work with OO.o in the past.  They have a great desktop Linux product.  They can simply take a ride on this one and eat the benefits.  There's really nothing Microsoft can say here.  Regardless of any agreements around OOXML that Novell may have with Microsoft, Novell comes out clean on the ODF front as customers demand it.

I noticed the press release includes a quote from Beijing's Redflag Chinese 2000 Software Co., Ltd., the makers of Redflag Linux and RedOffice.  This is significant.  Apparently last November I was one of the first people to blog about the document format work in China that led to a Chinese national standard (UOF).  Redflag Chinese 2000 was implementing UOF in Red Office (the Chinese packaging of OO.o).  There is work afoot to harmonize ODF and UOF.  And clearly Redflag Chinese 2000 remains committed to the OO.o effort.

So despite the bluff and bluster, the OOXML camp inside Microsoft should not be sleeping well at this point. 

"Don't blink.  Blink and you're dead.  Don't turn your back.  Don't look away.  And don't blink.  Good luck!" — the Doctor

Microsoft, Moonlight, and Open Source Software (and Novell's Brilliance!)

There's been interesting news about Microsoft support for the Novell Moonlight project this past few days.  Miguel de Icaza as community leader around Mono and Moonlight best tells the news on his blog, and points to Scott Guthrie's supporting blog post from Microsoft.  Tim O'Reilly points out that Microsoft will (predictably) support open source software for competitive advantage, in this case against Adobe.  Matt Asay supports Tim with the observation that Microsoft will use open source "where it's weak" and chides the two companies to just consummate the marriage.   

All the Moonlight support from Microsoft is a Very Good Thing for Moonlight and Novell, but let's be clear: Microsoft's participation in Moonlight is NOT Microsoft doing open source software. 

No code has been contributed to a community under a liberal license.  (As Miguel says, "Microsoft will give Novell access to the test suites for Silverlight to ensure that we have a compatible specification.")  No IP has been contributed to a community under a liberal license.  ("The codecs will be binary codecs, and they will only be licensed for use with Moonlight on a web browser".) 

Novell is doing the heavy lifting with help from Microsoft.  And in return, Novell is actually being pretty savvy (despite Matt's regular swipes at them for a lack of open source creativity and strategy).

• Novell is anchoring itself rapidly as the other cornerstone for cross-platform programming between Windows and Linux.  This gives them a valuable community center of gravity with respect to the enterprise that is much more valuable with customers than "we're not Red Hat".  Miguel has demonstrated himself as a brilliant community leader over the years.  Influence and IP control — It's all good for business. 
• It allows Novell to move Mono beyond the patent FUD and "science experiment" label Microsoft has traditionally thrown at it.  [Mary Jo Foley correctly called this one out.]  For Microsoft to renege on this very public initiative, or to try to claim behind closed doors that they like Moonlight but not Mono will demonstrate to customers once and for all that Microsoft doesn't understand the customer cross-platform/interop needs.  While Moonlight may be a great desktop experience, Mono is also all about server-side applications. 
• Before Microsoft gets any [BROKEN!] ideas around trying to jam yet another unproved specification through the standards process, Novell is anchoring the specification with a second high profile external implementation on another platform.  [This is a Very Very Good Thing for everyone.]

Microsoft certainly gains in the bargain as well.  They get to maintain a position on a multi-platform field they would otherwise forfeit to Adobe's open source maneuvering and market history around Flex and Flash.  They get to be seen publicly collaborating on Linux-based technologies so as to foster the belief with customers that they do genuinely care about cross-platform interoperability (and anchored around C# and .NET technologies).  They may even be in a GREAT position with respect to some customers to be the single source vendor of platforms when one considers the other collaboration deals in place with Novell.  It's win:win for each of them. 

But it's not Microsoft doing open source.  When we start to see Microsoft developer participation in the public code contributions for Moonlight, then they can claim to be "doing open source."  Regardless of the open sourcery of it all, however, it will be fascinating to see where this initiative goes.

Office Open XML Conformance (A Lesson in Claiming Standards Conformance)

So I'm a naive user of technology.  (No.  Really I am.  Ask anyone that's worked with me.) I am definitely not an expert in modern XML document standards.  (I have actually hacked troff escapes in a document production chain to insert commands in the PostScript output stream that would be recognized by the PDF generator to produce a hyper-linked document, so I know a little bit about the concepts involved, but that was also 10 years ago now.)

I am a [marvelously happy] Mac user for the past two years.  That means I already have iWork 2008 loaded with the new improved Pages '08 (the Apple word processor).  On the Apple web site, if I search for "office open xml" then I end up on this page (31 Aug, 2007), which tells me all about Pages '08:

Widely compatible.

Pages ‘08 supports industry-standard formats, so you can easily open documents created in other word processing applications and share documents with others. Whether they’re using a Mac or a PC.

Open for business.

Import your Microsoft Word documents into Pages ’08 with ease. Whether they’re Microsoft Office 2007 (Office Open XML) or earlier Word files, Pages will open them. Pages imports not only the text, but also the styles, tables, inline and floating objects, charts, footnotes, endnotes, bookmarks, hyperlinks, lists, sections, change tracking, and other elements of your original Word document.

COOL!  I'm in!  This is awesome.  I want to see how well I can read interesting docx files.  As it happens, ECMA International makes the Office Open XML standard available as both PDF and as docx files.  Clever — it's a document format standard see, and so they've provided it in its own format.  Perfect.   

So I download the .docx version of ECMA-376.  All 5 parts of it.  And I open "Part 1 - Fundamentals" and immediately get told some warnings occurred:   

I choose to review and get:

The file mostly looks good, but not quite as clean as the PDF image with the other font (Consolas?).  And clicking on the first warning (about the unsupported field) gives me NO additional information to understand what/where the error might be.  Now this is what we in the standards industry call "a quality of implementation issue".  Clearly Apple has not done a good job.   Get used to hearing this phrase a lot in the press — I'm predicting Microsoft will be forced to apply it liberally to their partners that helped them win votes and helped with the marketing message. 

Then I notice the paging problem.  I have no idea why, but there seems to be page drift between the PDF and .docx versions.  [More on THAT little problem in a minute.]  The paging problem does NOT mean there's necessarily a problem with the standard itself but rather the document production machine ECMA was using — we don't know what the definitive source and tool chain was that produced the PDF.  (Serious document production is the same as serious software production, something most word processor users fortunately don't get to experience.) Oh, and there are line numbers in the PDF that don't appear in the .docx as opened by Pages '08. 

Ignoring the document version skew problem, I decide to see what happens when I throw an even bigger docx file at Pages '08.  So I open "Part 3 - Primer"  and ...

    

A few more "warnings" to deal with here. More missing font problems.  Things were "removed".  No helpful information as to what or how. 

I asked a friend with Office 2007 to download and open the two .docx files.  You guessed it — no warnings.  So we're now on the slippery slope.  Apparently I can create files in Office 2007 that Microsoft marketing claims are "standard" Office Open XML that may (or may not) use proprietary extensions.  Or maybe Apple did a really bad job.  How would a government customer interested in preserving documents know?  But it gets worse.  The Office 2007 pagination perfectly matched the PDF version.  And there are line numbers in the Office 2007 version just like the PDF version. 

Ooops.

I'm betting the average business or government office person saving a file won't think twice about it.  You see Office 2007 gives you no way to save something as "strict" Office Open XML.  Not even not by default, but not at all.  Microsoft's definition of "Office Open XML" appears to be .docx itself. 

Indeed, even Apple's Pages '08 will only EXPORT to old Microsoft Office format (.doc) and not the standard Office Open XML (.docx) format.  So I appear to have no way to generate a OOXML file from Pages '08.  [Yes, yes, yes — Microsoft will again point out it's a quality of implementation problem.  Or they'll point out that Pages '08 is a "consumer" of OOXML only, which is allowed by the standard.  I get it.  It's not Microsoft's fault.  I'm beginning, however, to wonder at the quality of implementation on the Novell platform.  There's a business partnership under duress.]

So as an adjudicated monopoly of desktop operating systems, supplying an office productivity suite with 95+% market share, they will be able to claim instant victory for the adoption of their international standard because .docx files equal Office Open XML standard files.  Oh, wait — that's what was essentially done in the IDC study published this week that was "sponsored by Microsoft".

[Now we're about to get a wee bit tedious and exact as standards wonks are prone to be.  I'm going to try to explain the conformance game.  It can be subtle.  Apologies in advance for perhaps getting too ... well boring.  If you're not interested in standards mechanics, you can safely stop reading.]

So OOXML defines a couple of types of conformance.  There is Document Conformance, and Application Conformance.  And conforming applications can be producers (i.e. OOXML document writers) or consumers (i.e. OOXML document readers) or both.  Here's the text from the standard [Part 1, PDF edition, p. 3, lines 8-30]:

2.3 What this Standard Specifies
To address the issues listed above, this Standard constrains both syntax and semantics, but it is not intended to predefine application behavior. Therefore, it includes, among others, the following three types of information:

1. Schemas and an associated validation procedure for validating document syntax against those schemas.  (The validation procedure includes un-zipping, locating files, processing the extensibility elements and attributes, and XML Schema validation.)
2. Additional syntax constraints in written form, wherever these constraints cannot feasibly be expressed in the schema language.
3. Descriptions of element semantics. The semantics of an element refers to its intended interpretation by a human being.

2.4 Document Conformance
Document conformance is purely syntactic; it involves only Items 1 and 2 in §2.3 above.

• A conforming document shall conform to the schema (Item 1) and any additional syntax constraints (Item 2).
• The document character set shall conform to the Unicode Standard and ISO/IEC 10646-1, with either the UTF-8 or UTF-16 encoding form, as required by the XML 1.0 standard.
• Any XML element or attribute not explicitly included in this Standard shall use the extensibility mechanisms described by Parts 4 and 5 of this Standard.

2.5 Application Conformance
Application conformance is purely syntactic; it also involves only Items 1 and 2 in §2.3 above.

• A conforming consumer shall not reject any conforming documents of the document type (§4) expected by that application.
• A conforming producer shall be able to produce conforming documents.

This is the traditional way things are done with programming languages standards as well.  The concept of a strictly conforming C-language program is defined in the ISO/ANSI C standard so as then to define conformance of an actual implementation (i.e. C-language compilers).  In the OOXML standard, document conformance exists to be able to talk about implementation conformance, i.e. what readers/writers need to produce or accept if they conform to the standard. 

For completeness sake, the "document type" reference in 2.5 above is described in section §4 as [Part 1, PDF Edition, p. 6, lines 16-26]:

document type — One of the three types of Office Open XML documents: Wordprocessing, Spreadsheet, and Presentation, defined as follows:

• A document whose package-relationship item contains a relationship to a Main Document part (§11.3.10) is a document of type Wordprocessing.
• A document whose package-relationship item contains a relationship to a Workbook part (§12.3.23) is a document of type Spreadsheet.
• A document whose package-relationship item contains a relationship to a Presentation part (§13.3.6) is a document of type Presentation.

An Office Open XML document can contain one or more embedded Office Open XML packages (§15.2.10) with each embedded package having any of the three document types. However, the presence of these embedded packages does not change the type of the document.

Now there is no statement of conformance to Office Open XML on the Apple web site beyond the above statement of "support".  A search in Pages '08 Help for "office open xml" finds no reference at all.  So Apple appears not to actually claim conformance to the OOXML standard anywhere.  They simply "support" it.  So they're not really guilty of not reading a conforming OOXML document. 

But the Microsoft standards and marketing machines are claiming "support" for their standard with the assured tones that "support" = "conformance".  Aside from the successful "adoption" claims in the aforementioned IDC report (where Office 2007 market share apparently equates to Office Open XML adoption) we have Tom Robertson (Microsoft General Manager of Standards and Interoperability) "citing support in products from Novell, Corel, Apple and others."    Disingenuous at best.

Jason Matusow points out on his blog:

A real litmus test for the viability of the ISO/IEC DIS (draft international standard) 29500 (Open XML) is whether or not there are independent implementations. The answer to this question for Open XML is an unequivocal yes. There are independent Open XML implementations based on the existing specification in applications that run on Linux, Mac, Palm OS, iPhone, and Windows. 

Again note the complete lack of reference to actual conformance per the definitions in the standard they have driven through the process.  These are the people that are responsible for standards management and messaging at Microsoft.  They are by definition the folks that should be defending the strict conformance of the standards in which they participate, and not merely suggesting that partial implementations are a "great start".

So where does this leave the government customer that thought they were buying an open document format for document exchange and interop?   It is indeed finally time to roll out the certification machine — for everybody.  Let the games continue.

Microsoft's Failures with the OOXML Standard

The ISO "fast track" vote on approval of Microsoft's OOXML document specification happens next Monday (2 Sep.), and news is breaking fast and furious as various countries report out early.  An interesting bit of technical experimentation was published in the past week in the shadow of the vote.  It shows something more pragmatically damning than all of Rob Weir's hard work digging through faults in the OOXML specification. 

The work is published as a set of experiments.  The first experiment takes a trivial spread sheet created with Microsoft Excel 2007.  The next step is to unpack the Excel generated "standard OOXML" and make a trivial edit to it and repack it.  Excel then complains violently about the result (i.e. to the point of not reading the document). 

This is a catastrophic failure on two fronts for Microsoft's "standard": 

• It means Microsoft Office DOESN'T ACCEPT WELL FORMED OOXML documents not produced by Microsoft Office.  This would be very bad for all those customers that believe the marketing and think they're buying a product implementing a "standard" that will [someday maybe] be supported by multiple implementations.
• It means the Microsoft OOXML specification has sufficient problems in what it isn't saying in that implementors can't implement it.  (Changing a one character field in human readable XML with an editor is about as basic as it gets for implementation.)

Game over.  A standard that can't be implemented is WORSE THAN USELESS.  It really demonstrates that this standard they rammed through ECMA is nothing more than a vendor's product specification.   The rest of the experiments are equally telling in terms of the apparent use of product features outside the specification, etc.

This is not to say that Microsoft won't keep the steam roller crashing right along.  From Mary Jo Foley this week we see that Microsoft is still "buying research" from IDC in a study declaring great uptake for OOXML.  [I'm not linking to it because frankly it deserves to be buried.  I won't even give it the small link credit this blog engenders.]  While the IDC folks try to avoid complicity in the biased survey by openly declaring under the title that it was "Sponsored by Microsoft", we know the Microsoft marketing machine will happily be using the numbers and graphs in slides, attributing it all to an IDC study and failing to mention they paid for the "opinions".  Too bad for the credibility of the IDC researchers when this one comes home to roost. 

The incredible adoption for "OOXML" is likely a measure of market share on Office 2007 since it would be the only product claiming to implement the standard.  The way the "study" keeps conflating PDF with ODF/OOXML is broken as well.  So WHEN customers discover the truth of the implementation difficulties and continued lock-in of their document world, they'll respond the way customers always do when a vendor pulls a fast one on them.

Perhaps the most disheartening failure however is the way Microsoft has abused the machine that is the world's standards development organizations.  Andy Updegrove has a brilliant if painful read on the damage that Microsoft has caused in its "race to win."  Standards are needed and important.  In the days of film cameras, you wouldn't have been able to grab a roll of 35mm ASA 400 film from any store anywhere on the planet (produced by multiple different companies with their own value added services and technologies) and have it just work in your camera without such standards from such organizations. 

Microsoft is pushing organizational rules to the breaking point, ballot stuffing and buying its way to a win at ISO.  They have complained from the beginning of the process that they're doing nothing different than the likes of their competitors who are "aligned against them."  But this shows as much ignorance and naivete as the quality and implementability of their specification.  Companies like IBM and Sun have invested deep and long and globally in their standards participation activities.  They don't need to stuff the ballot box in a sudden end game -- they're invested in the long term infrastructure itself.   They absolutely play to win and sometimes surprise one in their creative use of the rules and organizational structures.  But they win because of a long term commitment to the machine itself, not to winning a particular battle at all costs. 

Standards at Microsoft has been run by lawyers instead of technology standards practitioners for too long.  It's been demonstrated time and again from the very beginning of the ODF working group formation in a succession of tactical and strategic failures by Microsoft.  To those lawyers that have never actually participated in standards working groups, or the standards management process, or implemented to the specification, or designed a certification process to demonstrate conformance, this is just one more battle to win and hang the consequences.  (Indeed, if we can "win" we can use it as precedent to "win" again!)

The sad part is that even if the ISO vote actually goes in Microsoft's favour, it still won't matter.  It buys them a few years of market ignorance at best.  This entire two year event is one for the standards text books on how not to respond to a business threatening standard.    In the end, Microsoft will need to implement ODF natively.  They don't know it yet, nor do they understand why, but it is just a matter of time.

Microsoft's Open Source Tipping Point Approaches

Mary Jo Foley invited me to guest post on the ZDNet blogs.  "Frost sightings in Hell" is my thoughts on last week's announcements from Microsoft at OSCON.

I would not presume to suggest that Microsoft is embracing openness and transparency and forgetting its competitive roots.  I still believe ODF will be to Microsoft what the Internet bubble bursting was to Sun Microsystems.  The ODF wars show lobbying at its ugliest and it will only get worse as they fight for survival on the other half of the revenue stream.   It's a big company with lots of players and culture comes from the top of an organization. 

As PJ points out, Ballmer recently announced during the financial analysts meeting, "we've worked very hard on making the value of a commercial company surpass what the open-source community can deliver, because frankly, it's not a business model we can embrace." 

Ballmer still doesn't understand (perhaps deliberately) that it isn't "open source" or "software freedom" against which he's competing, but a collection of business models with different margins and different value propositions.  So be it.  It's not my problem.

I do however believe the company is learning.  Larry Lessig rightly suggested that code is law;  wearing my commercial hat I would also suggest code is currency.  Some at Microsoft are finally participating in the coin of the realm. 

Microsoft and Xen and Patent Leadership

Sam Ramji gave an excellent short talk at OSCON 2007 on Linux and Windows Interoperability: On the Metal and on the Wire.  Sam described the collaborative work being done inside the Microsoft open source labs to better enable virtualization with the Xen world. 

Indeed, Xen comes from a GPL licensed project where Microsoft was a sponsor of the original University of Cambridge work.  HP and Intel are still sponsors.  (Of course you need to use the Wayback machine to begin to see hints of this.)  This is all good.  But I couldn't help but wonder at two questions during Sam's presentation:

• What is the patent landscape around virtualization?
• What is Microsoft's position with respect to Xen and Xensource if someone were to attempt a patent run against the project?

A quick check of the USPTO patent database can give us a initial inexact feel for the space:

• Patents with VMWare as the assignee (22)
• Patents with Microsoft as the assignee (7117)
• Patents with Microsoft as the assignee and containing "virtualization" (20)
• Patents with Advanced Micro Devices and containing "virtualization" (4)
• Patents with International Business Machines and containing "virtualization" (130) !!!
• Patents with SWSoft as assignee and containing "virtualization" (2)
• Patents with SWSoft as assignee [SWSoft makes Parallels] (6)
• Patents with Intel as assignee and containing "virtualization" (100)
• You get the idea ...

It's a potentially messy space.  As virtualization lives so firmly on the hardware/firmware/software boundary, we don't even need to have the debate over the relevance and merits (or lack thereof) of software patents.  Somewhere in that collection of patents there are likely to be hardware patents, or firmware patents indistinguishable from hardware, and they may read on the Xen space.   

Are we afraid yet?  I'm rattling the sword very very loudly.  Worried at all?  Even an eensy-weensy bit?  Hopefully NOT.  VMware, Microsoft, Apple and SWsoft at a glance have been shipping products for some time.  Intel, AMD, and IBM have been building hardware to be virtualized for some time.  And Xen has existed for some number of years squarely in this space, and academia is not naive when it comes to patent filings.  As a company, Xensource has been basing its race for the gold ring on the Xen project.  Xensource may even be an easy first target to pursue for a patent troll on the way to bigger and better shakedowns (although I certainly wouldn't bet against Intel, HP, VMware, Microsoft, etc. getting involved early.)   

Which brings us to the second question. 

Here is a perfect (and safe) opportunity for Microsoft to get out ahead of the curve, and demonstrate that they can learn and that they do "get it" and indeed that they can lead with respect to the licensing debate.  They can make the patent grant, here and now, to the Xen project.  As an intellectually interesting challenge for their legal team, they would be creating a deliberate license directly related to a project licensed under the GPL and stating (within their control) how their patent license does apply downstream, so as to not interfere with their assertion of patent rights in other areas.   The point would be to see how promiscuous they could be with their patent rights in a well defined way.  Sort of an interesting idea.  Indeed, it becomes a historical and game changing idea with respect to their competitors.   

To date their competitors keep rolling positional hand grenades out into the field and the Microsoft legal team feels obliged to leap on every one of them.  Mention the GPL and the Microsoft legal team runs screaming with their hair ON FIRE (to borrow a phrase from Eben Moglen's great Ubuntu Live keynote.)  Develop an enabling and protective patent license around Xen, and they begin to provide a basis for future interesting debate. [Some of the lawyers may even get to make a name for themselves publishing the brief!]   

Of course hell could freeze over too.  But it's great to dream.

Microsoft Continued Standards Abuse, PDF and the XML Paper Specification

Andy Updegrove and Bob Sutor have both well covered the announcement that Microsoft is now going to submit its PDF competitive "XML Paper Specification" to ECMA for standardization, which means they'll no doubt run it to ISO after ECMA so as to claim an international standard. 

The economic point of standards is to encourage and enable multiple implementations of the thing specified providing choice and risk mitigation to customers.  A "standard" with one implementation is a vendor specification regardless of standards body imprimatur -- the economics benefits the vendor by enabling an ecosystem around their product.  So a successful standard needs to have multiple implementations.   

But there is another quality shared by successful standards.  Successful standards are based on existing practice and experience across a technology area.  There is a richness of trials, product successes and failures, over a period of years that feeds into the development of the specification that gets standardized once the right level of abstraction begins to become apparent.  You don't standardize new things because they need the ability to change and evolve.  You don't standardize a new product, because while standards invariably have mistakes, you don't deliberately want to standardize a new product's bugs. 

As Andy points out, Adobe's handling of PDF was indeed heavy handed.  But by the time PDF was launched by Adobe 10+ years ago, there was a wealth of broad industry experience in document formats, markup languages, page description languages, printer description languages and the appropriate levels of separation between them.  The format has stood the test of time with little change.  There are multiple readers and writers in the marketplace.  With the completion (finally) of the ISO standard, one can claim PDF is a successful standard. 

For Microsoft (or anyone else) to introduce a new and potentially innovative technology in the space should be encouraged.  Just because there is an accepted standard way of doing things should not mean society (through the marketplace) should ignore the opportunity to evolve a technology space and solve new related problems.   To publish the specification to encourage an ecosystem to explore and evolve the space (to the developing vendor's advantage) is also to be encouraged because that's good business practice, AND it provides the real-world economic test of the marketplace.  It also allows the vendor to reap the economic rewards of solving a new problem space for customers.    

But that's as far as something new should go.

Once again we have Microsoft dumping its new product specification into ECMA, with a scope that says the standard must align with the product.  They originally presented the format as their PDF killer as if that was somehow a feature customers need, so we also  understand they're not evolving anything, they're just competing with an accepted standard. 

I'm a big fan of Heinlein's (or Hanlon's) Razor, but regardless of whether this is malice or stupidity on Microsoft's part, it's very wrong from a standards perspective. 

We need just to say "no".

Microsoft Advertising Windows Embedded on Google

I googled "microsoft xandros".
While I typically don't notice ads, I happened to notice the first sponsored link on the right side of the page:      

Linux Download
Customize your Operating System.
Learn more about Windows Embedded.
www.Microsoft.com

You end up on the Microsoft Windows Embedded page. 
The word "linux" appears nowhere on the page. 
Sort of wrong and funny all at the same time on multiple levels.

The Microsoft Xandros Deal

"Microsoft, Xandros Broad Collaboration Agreement Extends Bridge Between Commercial Open Source and Microsoft Software"

And so it begins again ...

What was Announced
The actual details will presumably be held secret for as long as possible, just like the Novell Microsoft deal. Here are the details from the announcement on Microsoft's press wire: 

Over the next five years, Microsoft and Xandros will focus on five primary efforts:

• Systems management interoperability: Xandros and Microsoft believe advances in system management technology can significantly reduce the cost of operating large computer networks running diverse platforms.  Xandros will partner with Microsoft to deliver value-added heterogeneous management capabilities that will work with the next generation management capabilities that will work with the generation of Microsoft  System Center and Xandros Systems Management products, which provide end-to-end service management.  Xandros will also join Microsoft and other management vendors in implementing the WS-Management set of protocols in Xandros BridgeWays cross-platform management products and in various systems management standardization efforts.
• Server interoperability.  Xandros will license a broad set of Microsoft server communications protocols. Xandros will develop enhancements to Xandros Server, allowing it to interoperate more smoothly with Windows Server in a network setting.
• Office document compatibility.  Xandros and Microsoft share the view that competing office productivity applications should, by design, make it easy for customers to exchange files with one another.  To that end, Xandros will join Microsoft and other companies that are building open source translators fostering interoperability between documents stored in Open XML and Open Document Format.  Xandros will ship translators in upcoming releases of its Xandros Desktop offering. 
• Intellectual property assurance.  Through the agreement, Microsoft will make available patent covenants for Xandros customers.  These covenants will provide customers with confidence that the Xandros technologies they use and deploy in their environments are compliant with Microsoft's intellectual property.  By putting a framework in place to share intellectual property, Xandros and Microsoft can speed the development of interoperable solutions. 
• Microsoft sales and marketing support.  The companies are committing to a set of sales and marketing efforts to promote the output of their technical efforts.  As part of this effort, Microsoft will now endorse Xandros Server and Desktop as a preferred Linux distribution dues to Xandros' efforts to establish rich interoperability and deliver IP assurance to its customers.  Also, a specialized team of Microsoft staff will be trained on the value propositions of this collaboration to customers and channel partners.  Xandros will also become a member of the Microsoft Interop Vendor Alliance. 

Fine.  Whatever.   I really wish marketing people would remember how to speak English like the rest of us.  The hyperbole and bombast just deaden the senses. 

What might it mean for Xandros
Xandros is looking for love (possibly in all the wrong places).  A quick tour of DistroWatch for the comparative view for Xandros over the past 12, 6, 3, and one month periods shows it falling from 25th to 28th to 31st to 40th respectively.  Ubuntu sat in first until the past month when it dropped to second in interest behind PCLinuxOS.  The harsh part of the story is that regardless of which period you view, there are a lot of well know, well packaged systems ahead of Xandros including Ubuntu, OpenSuSE, Fedora, Debian, Gentoo, and Mandriva and that's just staying in the top dozen.  Even FreeBSD consistently ranks above Xandros on distrowatch.

I appreciate this is "interest" rather than sales as measured for Linux vendors.  But I'm looking for brand recognition here.  I even had to remind myself who Xandros was when I heard the news.  While that simply shows my ignorance, Xandros has been trying to be the "business person's" linux desktop, but Ubuntu and Novell have got to be hammering them pretty hard at this point in history.   

Novell signed its deal with Microsoft seven months ago.  They've made a lot of noise about how the coupon program has been GREAT for business.  (Other views differ.)  They weathered the community storm.  They have consistently said they don't believe Linux infringes any Microsoft patents, and that the IP related parts of the deal weren't about any current Linux patent infringement.  If you buy the public message, then the deal has likely been net positive for Novell, if only for the cash injection.  For Xandros this deal is their perceived chance to get some commercial love which they probably would like about now.

Corel is an investor in Xandros along with Linux Global Partners.  Corel has had a bizarre history with Microsoft, alternately suing and collaborating with them.  It should come as no surprise that a Corel spin-off like Xandros considers a deal with Redmond good business.

Xandros is giving:

• Xandros will implement WS-Management in BridgeWays (presumably in the next five years).
• Xandros is now a server communications protocol licensee.
• Xandros will join the ODF translator community.

Xandros is getting:

• The same deal on IP from Microsoft, i.e. Microsoft is generously promising not to sue Xandros customers.  Whatever.
• Lots of co-sales and co-marketing love. 

"By putting a framework in place to share intellectual property, ...."  There is no "sharing" happening today.  A quick search of the USPTO database reveals the number of patents with "assignee name" of Xandros: ZERO.  The number of patents with an "assignee name" of Microsoft: 6776.  The number of patents with an "assignee name" of Corel (one of Xandros investors): 40.  It might be interesting to know what rights Xandros had to Corel patents, and what rights they may have just cross licensed, but that's Corel's problem.

What does it mean for Microsoft
They get a new protocol licensee which I'm sure they'll be pleased to trumpet to the EU. 

They get a renewed messaging platform for their continued infatuation with customers and patents instead of customers and solutions.  It's a broken platform which shows no leadership, but that apparently won't stop them from pushing it. 

They get to continue the messaging shades of grey around Microsoft Office Open XML and ODF.  "Xandros and Microsoft share the view that competing office productivity applications should, by design, make it easy for customers to exchange files with one another."  Microsoft sees its death in ODF.  They will fight like a cornered rat and message appropriately. 

"Microsoft will now endorse Xandros Server and Desktop as a preferred Linux distribution dues to Xandros' efforts to establish rich interoperability and deliver IP assurance to its customers."  I've confidence the discussions with Novell on this are hysterical in both meanings of the word.  It has the potential to be a distracting headache from a reasonable partnership with a first-tier commercial distributor of Linux, to be able to tout an IP message with a third-tier player. 

Is there an implication with GPLv3?
Damned if I know.  GPLv3 is not truly finalized, and I've confidence better minds, legally trained and hard-wired to the current GPL development process will weigh in here.  BUT, I'd be hard pressed to say this deal actually matters.  Linux is what it is.  The way it's licensed will be decided by the community that invests in it.  The GPLv3 will be what it will be.  It will be used by the communities that choose to use it.  Any conjecture on whether Microsoft signing a deal with a third-tier commercial Linux distributor is going to effect the process seems a bit wild.  I've confidence saner heads will prevail.  Well ... after an initial snarl or two. 

Should anyone care?
I saw Allison Randall on a recent OSBC panel on whether the Novell-Microsoft Deal was "good" for open source. She sat with Sam Ramji (Microsoft), Justin Steinman (Novell), and Jonathon Corbet (LWN.net).  Sam and Justin did a mostly fine job of clarifying the agreement, but Allison's point that the deal is irrelevant for open source was more important. 

The Novell-Microsoft deal was a deal between two vendors just like any other deal involving co-marketing, technical co-operation, and IP cross licensing.  (With Xandros there's apparently no cross license as they have nothing to license.)  Novell thinks its best serving its customers.  Microsoft thinks its best serving its investors.  So too with this Xandros-Microsoft deal.

There is no more patent infringement validation here, despite Microsoft posturing, than the Novell-Microsoft deal.  A hundred companies using free and open source software in their offerings to customers could sign patent cross licensing or covenant deals with Microsoft, and it means nothing with respect to the veracity of Microsoft's infringement claims.  Patents are tickets to negotiations.  They are (sometimes) interesting opportunities for discussions.  But they are utterly unproved until they enter a courtroom.   Some companies see a Microsoft deal as a strategic leg up in their business.  It means nothing with respect to possible claimed infringement, and even less to other mainstream players like IBM, and Red Hat.   It's all just business. 

Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

- Macbeth, Act V, Scene V

[Disclaimer: Microsoft is a client of mine.]

 

Microsoft Messaging on Patents and Open Source Software

Sam Ramji, Bryan Kirschner, Michael Francisco (and briefly Bill Hilf) from the Microsoft open source software lab were front and center last week at the Open Source Business Conference (OSBC), largely because of an article published the previous week in Fortune.  There were several discussions that centered around patents and software business from an open source perspective, and I realized there are several disconnects between the Microsoft legal team and their PR machine, and most of the rest of the world. 

The first disconnect appeared during Microsoft's day long event for open source ISVs the day before OSBC.  Microsoft represents a US$44B revenue stream.  Most of the executives from software businesses in the event represent companies that run US$2M to US$20M.  There is a world of difference between the way these companies need to behave with respect to intellectual property tools and their software assets. 

Most small companies don't care about patents in the same way as a large company must.  A small company will likely file for a patent or three because it can make a real difference in their valuation in both funding and M&A activity.  The management team, however,  applies a different calculus to the problem.  Filing for three patents with good patent attorneys could cost ~US$50K.  That's half a head count for a year.  And the patents won't be approved faster than 24-36 months.

Was the small company to discover a large company infringing their claims, they have very few real options.  They have a ticket to a negotiation implied in their ownership of the patent.  They can't afford to be greedy in the discussion because they can't afford the legal costs of a prolonged legal debate if business negotiations fail. Patent "cross licensing" deals with large companies with thousands of patents are not exactly balanced for small companies.

Most companies just don't live in the space of large cross licensing deals like a Sun, Microsoft, IBM, Intel, etc.  That doesn't mean the smaller company management teams don't respect intellectual property or don't care about it, they just value patents differently in their business model.  I imagine the average $20M company executive would happily entertain the painful and frustrating headache of $100M/year of inbound litigation with which Microsoft lives, if it came with a $44B revenue stream. 

These executives don't want "special" rules for intellectual property.  But neither do they need to think and apply the same rules the same way as companies that are Three Orders of Magnitude bigger.  Indeed, for most of these executives, trademark (i.e. brand management) and copyright management is everything to them, and they're very savvy with respect to copyright licensing. 

The second disconnect is the Microsoft talking point about return on investment for the R&D expense.  Microsoft rightly claims on the order of $7B spent each year on research and development.  The PR talking point is that "they want a return on that investment."  The rest of us see a $44B revenue stream and think, "and what part of that revenue stream shouldn't be considered ROI?"  This is what happens when you let lawyers (cost side of the balance sheet) think they can be a profit center. 

This brings us to the third disconnect.  The Microsoft executive and legal teams look to the IBM claims of $2B-$4B/year in IP licensing revenues and thinks, "why not us?"  Why not indeed.  Well let's look at some of the differences.  You see it's really a business marketing problem. 

Microsoft historically has a culture of putting programs in place so as to scale efficiently and keep margins high.  This is good business practice.   So the legal team did as well: here's the "IP Licensing" home.  [I think it's significant that the URL contains a segment named "about".  Remember --  legal is a cost center.  Most of the legal concerns that reach the public eye would rightly show up under "about" on most company web sites.]  As you explore this part of the site, you'll find all goodness about why you should license Microsoft IP through their licensing programs 'cause they're smart guys that invest a lot in R&D.  (And they are and they do.)

But it's different than the business model practices developed over the long haul by IBM.  Go look at the model Microsoft is chasing: here's the IBM IP licensing page.  The page starts with the statement that they're the market leader in awarded patents (regardless of R&D investment), and they're "expanding their use of intellectual property to accelerate the adoption of open standards and open source software through creative licensing and stewardship programs."  There's a prominent link on the simple page to all the program work in which IBM invests to modernize and reform the patent system and "reinvent the invention system."  It is a remarkable piece of positioning. 

Here is the company that clubbed Microsoft like a baby seal in the early cross licensing days, essentially playing the reformist hero.  It is masterful marketing. IBM thinks through the business strategy from all angles (including support for open source software), then tells a GREAT story about it.  [Indeed, an IBM executive would have wept for laughing so hard if they'd been present for the vaguely unprofessional bashing Sam Ramji took at the 451 Group reception at OSBC from a panel made up of Dan Kohn (Linux Foundation), Jeremy Allison (Google ex-Novell), and Eben Moglen. Andy Updegrove was the only balanced voice on the panel.  Sam had to stand in the audience with the rest of us plebes and wait his turn for the mic.]

It's not that Microsoft doesn't want reform in the patent system, they simply don't talk about the work they do sponsor.  And when they try to message reform it fails.  They come across complaining about the inbound $100M/year litigation costs, with the additional hammering they've taken by Eolas (~$500M) and the Sun license (another $2B).  They try to say they too want reform because they're victims too!  But it's a poor story up against the $44B revenue stream.   It has all the negative impact of Paris Hilton fretting about her approaching jail time while shopping for ten thousand dollar handbags.  (I wonder how much inbound litigation IBM takes a year?)

What they need is a leadership message.  One that resonates with a clean position with which the rest of us mere mortals can sympathize and possibly even support.  Daniel Chalef (CEO, Knowledge Tree) offered the start of one for them during the ISV day but it was likely lost and not recognized for the brilliance it represents.  Daniel suggested Microsoft take a leadership position in the EU AGAINST software patents. 

This is fabulous.  It could even be cleanly messaged as "encouraging the EU to not follow in the footsteps of the U.S. until such time as patent reforms have been implemented and proved."  They would not be saying no software patents, but rather encouraging the EU to not make the same mistake the U.S. made until the U.S. figures out how to clean up the mess we all agree exists.  It would show leadership, align with their current positioning, and not sound like victimized whining, nor would it clash with their licensing programs.   

IBM is leading the reform movement and winning friends with its messaging while happily licensing and defending its intellectual property.  It comes at a cost and maybe the margins aren't as good as Microsoft's historical packaged software margins, but business it is.  Sun has reinvented its executive messaging cleanly to say they've got to play the game as a large business in the U.S., and they'll only use the portfolio defensively.

It's time for Microsoft to do the same before they're again [possibly mis]quoted as making veiled threats against customers.   Microsoft is a software company.  It's about time they again acted as one and stopped pushing their IP licensing business to the forefront of their messaging.  It's not (nor will it ever be as big as) the business we (their customers) know they're in so it only serves as too frustrating a distraction.