Why Open Standards and what Document Freedom has to do with it

Standards in Information and Communication Technology control markets and people. They rule whther a market is open or not. On one hand they are a tool to control technologies and their use, on the other they (should) improve interoperability.

Escpecially in the software industrie we experience the eclipse of monocultures and they change from product to service business. Free or proprietary software vendors search for revenues in service business, establishing service based models like consulting, maintainance, enhancement, support and software as service.

In the Internet world software services are distributed by nature. This means, that most applications are driven by frontend and backend solutions. The simpliest paradigm is the Browser and Internet Scenario: the web hosts the applications, the browser displays and enables user interaction. In the times of AJAX and client driven meshups it often contains some business logic too. Lots of other client applications besides browsers rely on remote access to backend logic, which usually integrates a bunch of applications, in a modern software architecture typically a service based environment.

Interoperability is the key feature of our heterogenous it world. Single applications loose their importance. The heavyweight standard applications now have competitors, the perfect mixture of customization, integration and commercial and non-commercial of the shelf products. Some of these aggregations form solutions, other new products. Debian, RedHat, SUSE, JBOSS are such an aggregations, or alfresco, funambol and many more.

Standards define interoperability. Charging for the use of Standards have the same consequences like software patents. It creates revenue and control for a few. On the other side are thousands who pay the price.

Office software is the key technology to enforce standards. Documents are usually written to be exchanged. Document formats are technically complex, because the have not only to cover content, but also metadata and display information, embedded media, signatures, encryption, user rights and more.

A document lives in a world of different Word Processors in different versions with different features. To preserve all information between these systems is like translating a message throw a chain of human interpreters from different cultures, age and social contexts, like playing chinese whisper. In german we call this "stille post", which means "silent message". It is about hiding information. if you want to be shure to access possibly all visible information encoded in a document, you are forced to have access to the software system, which was used for the creation. In fact content obfuscation is used to control the users technical environment and therefore his digital communication abilities.

This is what is behind the little "document format war" between Open Document Format(free) and Office Open XML(Microsoft). The dominating office suite is under stress, for the first time the cash cows seems to show its limits. A market has to be defended which is in the central position in any environment. Most of all data is stored documents, not databases. We have royalty free sufficient standards to access database systems from different vendor, since many years: JDBC, ODBC. The software ecosystem works fine with this specifications. They are commonly accepted and implemented, in free and proprietary systems.

Imagine the same for documents. It would improve interoperability, accessibility, security, usability, business. The only standard having the potential to be an accepted solution for document access is ODF (Open Document Format). Royalty free, multivendor supported, open source implemented, freely available, extensible and pragmatic. And ODF is a OASIS standard right now. Microsoft is invited to join and collaborate.