Archives for January 2009

The State of ODF in OASIS

2009/01/26 By Rob 8 Comments

The year 2008 was a great year for ODF. The ODF Alliance has published their 2008 Annual Report [PDF] which is well-worth reading, especially for its coverage of ODF adoption. The date has long passed since I last could keep up with all the news stories related to ODF, so it is good to read over the report and see some of the accomplishments which I failed to note at the time.

It was a good year in OASIS as well, for ODF. The ODF TC, which I co-chair, created a new Subcommittee to investigate ODF-Next requirements, and we created a new OASIS TC, to join with the existing ODF TC and ODF Adoption TC, to work on “Interoperability and Conformance“. We also saw a substantial increased in participation in the ODF activities, spurred by the increased demand for ODF and the increased maturity of ODF implementations.

A few statistics you might find interesting on the level of participation in OASIS TC’s related to ODF, based on a tally I did this morning:

The three ODF TC’s have 81 members from 28 corporations/organizations, as well as 9 individual members. This count does not include the even larger number of OASIS members who are “observers” in these TC’s.
Large companies with participants in these TC’s include IBM, Google, Sun, Microsoft, Nokia, Oracle, Intel, RedHat, etc. a virtual “Who’s Who” of the tech sector.
Members reside in 13 different countries.
16 TC members are also members of their JTC1 or JTC1/SC34 NB’s. A total of 7 NB’s currently have members in the ODF TC’s.
The TC’s and SC’s had 95 meetings in 2008 and their current schedule calls for a combined 10 hours of teleconferences per month.
The main ODF TC had 439 person-hours of meetings in 2008.
The mailings lists for the TC’s received 2,594 posts in 2008, including 95 agendas and 95 meeting minutes.
ODF’s public comment list received 603 comments in 2008.

So 2008 was a good year, with robust participation from a wide range of stake holders in the development, maintenance and promotion of ODF in OASIS. I’m hoping for even greater participation and accomplishment in 2009, in spite of less-than-rosy economic conditions.

Monopoly Freedom Day

2009/01/23 By Rob 5 Comments

Each year the Tax Foundation, a 70-year old nonpartisan tax research group based in Washington, D.C., issues a press release on Tax Freedom Day, the day in the year where the average American worker has earned enough to pay their taxes for the year. In 2008 Tax Freedom Day was April 23rd. Of course, this is a rhetorical device, since we really pay taxes throughout the year, at various rates, and not all at once, but it is a useful device that illustrates the relationship between wages and taxes.

So, this got me thinking whether this same analysis could be applied to what I’ve been calling the “Monopoly Tax”, the excess price we pay for products from a monopolist when adequate open source alternatives are available.

Let me take a stab at the analysis. First, let’s look at the price of two entry-level PC’s, identical except that one comes pre-installed with Ubuntu and OpenOffice, while the other comes pre-installed with Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office. I’ll use Dell’s Inspiron 530/530n as an example. Same chip, same RAM, same monitor, same drive, same graphics, everything the same, except one comes with Linux and the other has the Microsoft software.

Dell Inspiron 530 with Microsoft Vista/Microsoft Office = $818.00
Dell Inspiron 530N with Ubuntu/OpenOffice = $428.00

So the “monopoly tax” in this case is $390, or 48% of the total cost of the system. Now that amount is probably not going to crush you or me. But for a student, a small town library strapped for funds, the recently unemployed, or a family in the developing world, this is a huge difference.

We can further quantify this by calculating the date of “Monopoly Freedom Day” for countries around the world, based on per-capita income. If you purchase a new PC on January 1st, you will work up until Monopoly Freedom Day just to pay the excess cost of the non-open source software. Up until Monopoly Freedom Day the fruits of your labors are not going to you, you family or your community. Your wages are going to Redmond, to fatten the stock portfolio of the wealthiest man in America. Think about it. You know that Microsoft has. With the poorest countries in the world being the ones who would benefit most from using open source to avoid paying the Monopoly Tax, Microsoft has started a new “Scramble for Africa” in order lock them into a costly cycle of technological dependency in a new colonialist campaign.

Country	Monopoly Freedom Day
Luxembourg	Jan 02
Ireland	Jan 04
Norway	Jan 04
United States	Jan 04
Switzerland	Jan 04
Qatar	Jan 04
Austria	Jan 04
Denmark	Jan 04
Netherlands	Jan 04
Finland	Jan 04
United Kingdom	Jan 04
Canada	Jan 04
Belgium	Jan 04
Singapore	Jan 04
United Arab Emirates	Jan 05
Greece	Jan 05
Australia	Jan 05
Japan	Jan 05
Israel	Jan 05
France	Jan 05
Germany	Jan 05
Italy	Jan 05
Cyprus	Jan 05
Spain	Jan 05
New Zealand	Jan 06
Slovenia	Jan 06
Korea	Jan 06
Czech Republic	Jan 06
Portugal	Jan 06
Malta	Jan 07
Kuwait	Jan 07
Barbados	Jan 07
Trinidad and Tobago	Jan 08
Argentina	Jan 09
Saudi Arabia	Jan 09
Poland	Jan 09
Croatia	Jan 10
Mauritius	Jan 11
South Africa	Jan 11
Chile	Jan 11
Russia	Jan 11
Uruguay	Jan 12
Malaysia	Jan 12
Costa Rica	Jan 12
Mexico	Jan 12
Romania	Jan 13
Bulgaria	Jan 13
Kazakhstan	Jan 14
Brazil	Jan 14
Belarus	Jan 15
Bosnia and Herzegovina	Jan 15
Turkey	Jan 15
Thailand	Jan 15
Tunisia	Jan 15
Panama	Jan 16
Iran	Jan 16
Colombia	Jan 17
China	Jan 17
Ukraine	Jan 17
Azerbaijan	Jan 17
Venezuela	Jan 18
Peru	Jan 20
Serbia	Jan 20
Fiji	Jan 24
Morocco	Jan 24
Lebanon	Jan 24
Jordan	Jan 24
Sri Lanka	Jan 25
Armenia	Jan 25
Philippines	Jan 25
Egypt	Jan 27
Ecuador	Jan 29
Jamaica	Jan 31
Syrian Arab Republic	Feb 01
India	Feb 04
Cuba	Feb 04
Vietnam	Feb 08
Ghana	Feb 18
Pakistan	Feb 18
Uzbekistan	Feb 26
Zimbabwe	Mar 01
Bangladesh	Mar 04
Côte d’Ivoire	Mar 24
Kenya	Apr 08
Nigeria	Apr 22
Congo	Jun 09
Tanzania	Jun 13

Inaugural address words

2009/01/20 By Rob 5 Comments

A word cloud made using Wordle, of the texts of all inaugural addresses, from that of April 30th, 1789 until today’s. The 500 most-used words are displayed (leaving out ‘the’, ‘a’, ‘is’, etc.) with font size proportionate to frequency of use.

Some of the least-used words in inaugural addresses, the hapax legomena of inaugural addresses, used only once in that corpus, include ‘cocaine’ (George W. Bush), ‘Batavian’ (John Adams), and ‘cattle’ (Benjamin Harrison). Oh what I’d pay to hear, just once, a president inveigh against cocaine-snorting Batavian cattle, rather than platitudes about new beginnings. (And I’ll guarantee you that within a week this page will be the #1 authority, as judged by Google, on bovine cocaine abuse in Batavia.)

ODF 1.0 Errata 01

2009/01/12 By Rob Leave a Comment

Back in March 2007 JTC1/SC34 issued the following statement:

Liaison Statement from JTC1/SC34 to OASIS ODF TC

Defects have been identified in ISO/IEC 26300 and defect reports will be submitted to the OASIS ODF TC.

SC 34 requests that the OASIS ODF TC respond to these defect reports in a timely fashion and publish errata in accordance with OASIS procedures.

SC 34 requests that the Project Editor of ISO/IEC 26300 submit draft technical corrigenda consistent with OASIS approved errata conforming to ISO requirements for SC 34 ballot.

However, a defect report was not submitted by SC34 until seven months later, when a formal defect report (N0942) was eventually submitted.

I’m pleased to report that the OASIS ODF TC has created and approved a response to this defect report. The official announcement is here.

You won’t find any substantive changes to the standard. The document mainly addresses trivial editorial errors. No implementation will need to change because of these errata. Some might argue that it is a complete and utter waste of time to make editorial changes to a standard when they can have no effect on implementations. And this is true, up to a point. But there is always the possibility that a minor grammatical or spelling error might, when the ODF standard is translated into another language, be transformed into a more substantive error. So, perfecting the text of a standard, even 4 years after publication, does serve a minor purpose and deserves proportionate attention.

Since several members of JTC1/SC34 have expressed a strong desire of keeping the OASIS and ISO/IEC versions of the ODF in sync, I’m sure they will be eager to turn this errata document into technical corrigenda for approval by SC34, now that OASIS has done what was asked of it, i.e., “published errata in accordance with OASIS procedures.” The ball is in their court now.

Ten Resolutions for 2009

2009/01/03 By Rob 9 Comments

Here are my obligatory New Year’s Resolutions. These are my personal ones, what I’m doing for myself. I’ll also have a set of professional resolutions, what we at IBM call “Personal Business Commitments” or PBC’s. I still need to develop those for 2009.

Exercise at least 30-minutes every day. Unlike every other January when I said this, this time I’ll actually do it. Really. Honest.
Eat better: less saturated fat, more fiber, more veggies, more whole grains, etc.
Suffer fools gladly, or at least a bit more gladly than I did in 2008.
Learn how to use R well. I dabble with it today, but I don’t really know how to use its full power.
Learn to program Python well. Today I can write programs to do simple administrative tasks, parsing data, downloading web pages, etc. But Python is here to stay and I feel my life would be simpler if I knew it well.
Spend more time in the garden. With global warming, fuel prices, chaos in the Middle East, etc., it is absurd to eat tomatoes that have been shipped 2,000+ miles to my dinner table. I’m going to try to grow a substantial portion of the fresh vegetables that I eat.
Read Ulysses, maybe twice.
Enjoy turning 40, but not too much.
Study a new language, something cool like Sumerian or Dutch.
Spend more time when taking pictures and less time in Photoshop trying to fix them.