][ stefano maffulli

I’m not a big believer of hosted applications mainly because they fail to deliver the ‘run everywhere there is a connection to the internet’ promise. Nonetheless, I’m using hosted apps very often, especially for school papers where I have to collaborate with other people on one document. In these cases I would like to have more freedom and more privacy. That’s what I like in Marco ‘Clipperz‘ Barulli’s call for action for a suite of web applications built following the zero-knowledge methodology:

The basic idea was to deliver a no trust needed service, where users had the ability to inspect and verify anything running in their browser. We had to drift the attention away from trusting us and let users focus on trusting the application.

Add the Affero GPLv3 on top of this methodology and you can have a suite of online applications that respect freedom and privacy.  Not a bad thing to have, not at all.

We’re back to square one, 1 ISO standard on each side of the barricade since Microsoft managed to convince the ISO that its proprietary standard, OOXML  deserves the approved stamp. For all the money Google and IBM have thrown trying to stop it, it seems they’ve lost this battle. But I’ve learned yesterday from a ISO member that there are still 60 days for any country to appeal the decision. Given the irregularities mentioned by many, this is not a remote possibility.

But anyway, I wish we would all move on and focus on two main actions for two main groups of people.  Developers should focus to deliver good code to compete with Microsoft Office.  Advocates and lobbyist should instead convince Microsoft customers and Microsoft execs directly to modify the Open Specification Promise in order to fix its shortcomings (and make it compatible with GPLv3).  I think this will help free software (whose interests don’t necessarily coincide with those of IBM and Google) and I’m sure that there are people at Microsoft ready to listen.

If you close your eyes and stay in silence for a few minutes you will hear the echo of the fight engaged by Microsoft against Google and IBM (with many more smaller allies) to dominate the future of office documents. I’m now following from the distance and there is so much dust it’s impossible to see who is winning.

It’s clear though who is losing: ISO, the once glorious International Standards Organization lost. Its image of highly respected organization is devastated by the abuse of the inevitable cracks in its regulament that led to many irregularities. It’s easy to blame Microsoft this time: their OOXML proposal is not ready, they’re late in its development and it’s so bloated it’s impossible to implement. On the contrary ISO approved ODF (ISO 26300) is good enough, stable and widely used already.

It’s a sad, sad story, however it will end.

If you’re interested to discuss the issues of open standards and you’re in Milano on April 2nd, I’ll be at OMAT360 to listen to the round table about the implications of file format standards in the society. It’s going to be interesting, with speakers from Microsoft, Adobe, OO.org, public administration and others.

A group of free software organizations and companies declared today the Document Freedom Day, a day dedicated to the promotion of Free Document Formats and Open Standards in general. Data lock-in is a very serious issue for knowledge based economy and knowledge workers. All we do is collect data to elaborate information and create knowledge. When we store this knowledge on our computers we better make sure that we will be able to retrieve them any time with ease.

Open standards are the only way to start securing the future of society. Unfortunately greed of companies promoting proprietary standards together with ill advised governments can put our future in joepardy.

Today I join FSFE, Funambol and the rest of the crowd celebrating document freedom with a wider perspective than the just the ‘office documents’ we’re used to. When I think of a document on my computer I think of every file I store in there, every database, every map, every picture, every email message, every bookmark, every calendar entry. That’s my life, my work, my being today and my future, my knowledge, the product of my life. And that’s on my computer as well as on my cell phone and in web-based applications. I want to celebrate open standards, not just ODF, because only with open standard I can still dream of a different computer system where files don’t exist and all the knowledge I need comes to me at the right time, instead of me hunting it. Happy DFD2008.