Open Format Duel Enters New Round After Mass. Decision

Following BetaNews' story yesterday on the State of Massachusetts' decision to propose formally accepting Microsoft's Office Open XML as a "suitable" format, advocates on two of the three sides of this issue wrote us to say they were concerned our story's contents might tend to favor a different side.

First, a Microsoft spokesperson cautioned us about a statement we cited from Linux Foundation board member and attorney Andrew Updegrove. "I was reading your story on the Massachusetts policy and was noticing something in Andy Updegrove's quote at the end of your piece which is actually inaccurate," the spokesperson wrote, "which I'm guessing he may not realize, but thought you'd want to know.

"If I was reading his quote correctly, Andy seemed to be saying that Open XML has only a single implementation - Office. When in fact there are more than a dozen implementations from folks other than Microsoft, so people can be using Open XML whether they're running Windows, Linux, Mac or Palm platforms."

The Microsoft spokesperson then pointed us to a list of Open XML implementers presented last May by Office team program manager Brian Jones on his team's blog. Corel WordPerfect and Novell's rendition of OpenOffice appear there, though not every item on the list is an application or application suite.

Later, Mark Blafkin, a spokesperson for the Association for Competitive Technology, wrote to say his firm took issue with the way we set up the quote from ACT President Jonathan Zuck. For the record, our initial sentence of the update to that story did begin, "In perhaps the clearest indication to date that enough is never enough..."

"As you can tell from our statements, we have always had a problem with approach of the Massachusetts Policy," Blafkin wrote to BetaNews, "not its goals of long-term access of documents, interoperability, etc. And, as we told reporters and officials alike, simply adding Microsoft's formats to the policy wouldn't solve the problem. It might alleviate a short term political problem for them, but it wouldn't solve the fundamental efficacy problem of a technology mandate policy. The updated policy is better because it is no longer a strict technology mandate, but it is still has some inherited problems from the previous version, most notably the requirement for open standards versus open formats."

Blafkin cited Adobe's PDF as an example of an open format that was not an open standard - in effect, a specification that did not require ratification by a standards body in order to be freely utilized by developers without owing royalties. The Commonwealth's problem, he went on, is that it has only been able thus far to endorse PDF as its choice for archiving documents, not for any of the other purposes which it has found in the commercial sector.

"The value of PDF to the Commonwealth's policy to enhance interoperability and long-term document access, led Massachusetts create a special carve-out for PDF because it has become a de facto standard," Blafkin wrote us. "The fact that they had to create the carve-out demonstrates the problem we see in the policy."

Finally, Blafkin argued that if Massachusetts had to choose an audio/video encoding standard for itself, based on its current criteria, it would have to exclude Ogg Vorbis from consideration since it has yet to be accepted as a standard by the IETF after four years of debate. The state would also have to exclude the Free Lossless Audio Codec, he added, not because it utilizes a free and open-source format but because it's not an open standard.

Blafkin's point boils down to questioning why a format has to be a standard in order to be accepted. He did not provide any further examples with regard to possible open applications formats that would be excluded from Massachusetts' consideration by virtue of their lack of ratification by a standards body.