Andy Updegrove is a key commentator on the ODF vs MS-OOXML debate. In the above article he lays out his reasoning for believing that Microsoft haven't gone far enough in answering the criticisms that people have levelled at their MS-OOXML offering. To do this, he describes a series of Why the OOXML Vote Still Matters: A Proposal to Recognize the Need for “Civil ICT Standards”"Civic ICT Rights":
- That any citizen can use any product or service, proprietary or open, that she desires when interacting with her government.
- That any citizen can use any product or service when interacting with any other citizen, and to exercise every civil right.
- That any entrepreneur can have equal access to marketplace opportunities at the technical level, independent of the market power of existing incumbents.
- That any person, advantaged or disadvantaged, and anywhere in the world, can have equal access to the Internet and the Web in the most available and inexpensive method possible.
- That any owner of data can have the freedom to create, store, and move that data anywhere, any time, throughout her lifetime, without risk of capture, abandonment or loss due to dependence upon a single vendor.
Some of these are long term goals rather than quickly reconcilable ones - equal access to the web is all well and good, but equal access to water may be a slightly more pressing goal and use of funds than infrastructure for good quality broadband - eventually though, yes. The important ones to me are 1 and 5. They say that I should be able to actually interact with my government through the internet without having to pay a corporation to allow me that privilege and that I will be able to access these same things in the future.
This is where standards come in. Fully documented, freely available and freely implementable. Without these three features in a file format standard, I cannot guarantee being able to open any document. Without these three features in a communication feature I wouldn't be able to guarantee accessing services or documents. Imagine a world where in order to talk to the government you had to pay a single company for the privilege. It becomes an undemocratic tax used not to benefit the state (and by extension, in theory, you) but instead to line the pockets of the shareholders. That is the level of importance this debate holds.
I highly recommend reading his article if you are concerned at all about how monopoly power could affect your ability to interact with the government in the near future, or how you might access your data in years to come (EDIT: See also this blog from Google). I recommend you also read up on this and consider writing to your elected representatives about their plans to use fully open standards to communicate with us, their supposed masters.
Alex
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