I know within IBM we’re making the switch. Bob Sutor recently pointed that out. On Friday I also upgraded to the latest build of Symphony (as did every IBMer did per our automatic update tool). The switch still has miles to go, but much of the mythical “last mile cable” has been installed.

What prompted me to realize this just today? I receive the ODF Alliance Newsletter regularly in my inbox. Today, I noticed the following:

(note that while the URL is in Spanish, the translation can be seen here thanks to Google)

The latest government in South America to advance the use of ODF is Ecuador. Upon its approval by the Instituto Ecuatoriano de Normalización (INEN) as an Ecuadoran national standard, ODF was also adopted for sending and receiving documents by the national government’s Secretariat for Information Technology (Subsecretaría de Informática), whose mission is to improve the government’s management of IT projects and coordinate actions in this field in other public sector institutions in Ecuador . In South America, the governments of Brazil, Uruguay and Venezuela have already adopted ODF, as have several regional governments, including Parana (Brazil) and Misiones (Argentina). 

http://www.informatica.gov.ec/index.php/noticas/7-nacional/139-subinfo-adopta-odf-para-intercambio-de-informacion (Sp)

Since most Office users would be happy to continue using Microsoft’s old binary formats, and since those for whom open standards are important would probably prefer ODF or PDF formats anyhow, I won’t be surprised if OOXML quietly dies before that future Office iteration ever sees the light of day.

The British Standards Institution has been taken to court by a group of Unix users in an attempt to get the standards body to recant its approval of Microsoft’s Office Open XML document format.

I find it ironic that there is not a single instance where anyone has really shown a love for OOXML or some sort of even small inclination that it was a good thing to approve as an international standard. Instead it seems the vote was PawnsPaidByMSFT vs PeopleWhoThinkForThemselves. Well now it’s in the UK courts.

http://www.news.com/Office-2007-fails-OOXML-conformance-test/2100-7344_3-6237855.html?tag=html.alert.hed

http://documentfreedom.org/News/20080326

We spoke to Bob Sutor, vice president of standards and open source for IBM, who responded to Microsoft’s recent claims regarding IBM’s involvement in the OOXML dispute. “IBM believes that there is a revolution occurring in the IT industry, and that smart people around the world are demanding truly open standards developed in a collaborative, democratic way for the betterment of all,” Sutor told Ars. “If ‘business as usual’ means trying to foist a rushed, technically inferior and product-specific piece of work like OOXML on the IT industry, we’re proud to stand with the tens of countries and thousands of individuals who are willing to fight against such bad behavior.

ComputerWorld

Satyadas said IBM thinks that this year, it will happen. “All the stars are lining up,” he said. “Everybody has been saying that since 2001 except IBM. We never said that, but we are saying that now.”

Matt Asay’s Cnet Blog

It’s easy to overlook IBM’s announcement that its Lotus Notes and Lotus Symphony suites will run on Ubuntu. I think this would be a mistake. IBM is not a dumb company. It’s not in the habit of wasting resources. For IBM to be partnering up with Ubuntu says something about the enterprise mindset on Ubuntu.

InformationWeek

By porting key software to Linux, IBM is looking to give businesses one less reason to buy products from rival Microsoft — which IBM said offers “a proprietary desktop model.” IBM’s Linux efforts will “further address customer demands around choice,” said Inna Kuznetsova, an IBM executive with responsibility for Linux, in a statement.

“We are working to democratize information,” Whitehurst said. “A lot of people don’t see the importance of that. But, ultimately, it is about information freedom and making sure information’s accessible.

“If we don’t fight those battles now, our entrenched competitors will lock up file formats, force you to use their software or force royalties,” he added. “Then the information stored in those formats will no longer be free.”

http://www.linux-foundation.org/weblogs/cherry/2007/09/18/piling-on-office-and-collaboration/

Any of these announcements by themselves would be significant, but the combination of these is really sounding the starting pistol for competition in the multi-billion dollar office productivity race. And this time around, it is not a one horse race.

Today, though, IBM also announced Lotus Symphony – a no charge set of office productivity editors (you may be familiar with Microsoft Office’s Excel, Powerpoint, and Word – they’re very similar). IBM’s Symphony suite, like OpenOffice allows users to also start transitioning to OpenDocument Format (ODF). The new suite is NO CHARGE (yes, the nice way of saying “free” without implying “cheap” or “dumbed down”). These are the real deal, the same editors that come bundled with Lotus Notes 8 and the work on Linux or Windows (although I prefer Linux). The URL to download them is here:

www.ibm.com/software/lotus/symphony

The interesting thing now is that Microsoft Office costs what… $X00 and you can get the IBM Symphony suite for $0. Symphony handles Word, ODF, and many other formats (including PDF output)… Microsoft Office… well… not so much. Symphony is even cheaper than StarOffice (unless you go through GooglePack)

Take Symphony for a test run – there’s no charge – and keep an eye out because I can absolutely feel OpenOffice and by proxy Symphony are going to see great advances in their evolution going forward.

A nice quote from Steve Mills with a relation back to Linux:

“IBM is committed to opening office desktop productivity applications just as we helped open enterprise computing with Linux,” said Steve Mills, senior vice president and group executive, IBM Software Group. “The lifeblood of any organization is contained in thousands of documents. With the Open Document Format, businesses can unlock their information, making it universally accessible on any platform and on the Web in highly flexible ways.”

In an information e-mail that, according to Microsoft, was sent to “a few” partner companies, the software giant stated that its partners were expected to register to vote with SIS and “take part in the meeting on Aug. 27 to vote yes for Office Open XML.”

Microsoft’s partners were also requested to attend more meetings after the vote in order to prove “their sincere participation”.

Gerrit has an interesting post bringing together a number of really good links over at his blog.

It is interesting to watch as Microsoft tries different strategies in dealing with the open source community, open standards and interoperability. This interesting ballot box management trick with OOXML is clever (oh, and if it is so good, repeat it, over and over again). Basically, manage the voting populace to ensure that only your voters turn out for a vote.

How long will the world allow this to happen? At what expense does this come for the integrity and viability of international standards organizations – especially the one named ISO?

What if Vanderbilt could have standardized railroad tracks according to his own, proprietary, patented rail size and shape – would the US have prospered as it did? Most people don’t really care about standards – it’s often like the legal world where people say, “Just let the experts fight it out and come back to me with your answer.” But that’s not what’s happening here – in this case it’s not experts debating the merits of a standard – you’re looking at one company trying to lock the world into a lifetime payment plan under the guise of an open standard.

It’s time to get loud.

http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/28/1237255

The vote on OOXML looked fairly secured. Most in the Working Group in Sweden was against the vote to approve OOXML. The day of the vote, though, more companies showed up at the door. Some 20 new companies — each one payed about $2500 to be allowed to vote — and vote they did … for Microsoft. Most of the new companies were partners from Microsoft who suddenly out of the blue joined the Working Group, payed membership fees and voted yes for approval. From the OS2World story: ‘The final result was 25 Yes, 6 No and 3 Abs and this would from the start be a done deal of saying No! Jonas Bosson who participated in today’s meeting on behalf on FFII said that he left the meeting in protest and so did also IBM’s Swedish local representative Johan Westman.’”

India has become the latest country to reject Microsoft’s global bid to provide an alternative standard for electronic office documents. India will now vote against Microsoft’s proposal at the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) in Geneva, joining countries like China and Canada.

After a meeting of the Bureau of Indian Standards in New Delhi Thursday, its technical committee chairperson, Nita Verma, told the media: “We unanimously agree on the disapproval of OOXML [Open Office Extensible Mark Up Language] with comments. The same will be submitted to ISO.”

Nonetheless, a good step in the right direction for open document standards. I’m a bit surprised (or let down) that the Google option for editors seems lacking in “surprise”…. or web+offline app delivery mostly…

As I’ve shown, in the rush to write a 6,000 page standard in less than a year, Ecma dropped the ball. OOXML’s spreadsheet formula is worse than missing. It has incorrect formulas that, if implemented according to this standard, would raise important health, safety and environmental concerns, aside from the obvious financial risks of a spreadsheet that calculates incorrect results. This standard is seriously messed up. Shame on all those who praised and continue to praise the OOXML formula specification without actually reading it.

http://blogs.sun.com/dancer/entry/odf_conversion_with_ant

The Free Software movement is dead,” Hilf said, in a typical quip, as quoted in “The Bangkok Post.” “Linux doesn’t exist in 2007. Even [Linux creator] Linus [Torvalds] has a job today.”

I’m curious if he was just misquoted, but that does happen. Obviously that was a terribly poor judgment as the free software movement is most certainly alive and well, and there are more people working on Linux than just IBM, Oracle, and Canonical. Bill, take a look at who really contributed to the 2.6.20 kernel Bill - there are many contributors (nearly 2,000 had code accepted just into the 2.6.20 kernel). The free software ecosystem is actually growing further – and many of the participants are Microsoft’s own long time partners. And yes, many of them do make a living (it’s hard to code Linux kernel code while wandering and asking for money on the streets). That is actually Microsoft’s real problem – these guys (and gals) are making a living – it’s an economically self-sustaining model. Sure, they are not making $92M/day like others, but they make a living and enjoy what they do.

Maybe that’s what has Microsoft so afraid that they’re reverting to their usual tricks (e.g. not competing on technology). After all, there used to be a huge force of Wintel+Dell, but even that partnership has changed…

Consider this: Google, IBM, HP, Dell, Intel, AMD, Novell, Red Hat, Oracle, Sun, SAP, Accenture, China, India, Ingram Micro, Tech Data, Avnet, vast numbers of global and local resellers, consultants, ISVs, and system integrators are all making vast fortunes for their shareholders off of Linux. Will the industry just let FUD tricks stand in their way??? Heck no, this industry invented FUD and certainly knows how to defeat it.

The real problem is that the industry is already defeating it. The MS monopoly is under attack from all sides: ODF, Linux Desktop, Linux server, Adobe RIA, Eclipse RCP, etc, etc and I see these latest threats as last resort efforts from a company clearly concerned about its long term growth. That’s a natural response, but another way to compete is to just fix your products and deliver something your customers want.

“This is the Fellowship’s ODF Validation Service, a free service that checks OpenDocument files for conformance with the ODF specification.

…

ODF validator written by Alex Hudson as part of the Fellowship’s ODF Tools project. Web service provided by Cyclone3 and maintained by Roman Fordinal. Learn more about Cyclone3 ODFvalidator extension.”