A number of journalists read last week’s piece as an attack on Microsoft. We want to explain what they walked past.
Whenever we address the contrast between ODF and OOXML, some people perceive it as a campaign against a company. It is not. We are trying to do something far more useful: to make the structural problem with the standard document format clear to those who have to live with it: public officials, educators, and above all, individual citizens.
All these people find themselves facing a problem they did not create, but which affects them daily, and of which they are often the unwitting victims, every time they create a document or receive one.
The least we can do – and in fact we have been doing it for twenty years, though until now almost no one has listened – is to explain, clearly and without drama, how the problem arose, why it persists, and why ODF is the only way out. It is an educational and selfless goal – we do not sell software, so we have no commercial interest to protect – and not an attack on a company.
The problem concerns the current document landscape, based almost exclusively on a proprietary format controlled by a single company, and what we could have had instead: a standard format controlled by an independent community of stakeholders.
Microsoft features in this story because of the rational-monopolist behaviour it has exhibited since 2006, during and after the standardization of the proprietary OOXML format: first promising the standard and then doing everything possible to ensure it was first ignored and then forgotten, quietly but with extreme determination. All of this to protect a market share now worth over $30 billion, which would have been at risk of erosion if the document format had been genuinely standardized: migration to any other office suite would then have been free of cost and complexity.
Today, most organizations – public agencies, supranational bodies, companies – and most individual users face a problem that, had everyone listened to independent experts between 2006 and 2008, would never have existed. The international standards system and national governments allowed a single vendor – rather than the community of developers, systems analysts and standards scholars who raised objections – to set the terms under which documents would be archived. That vendor chose its own proprietary format.
The problem, in other words, was created by institutions – ISO, national standards bodies, public officials and ultimately politicians – who approached the choice of format for public documents in a completely uncritical manner. They trusted the process despite repeated and legitimate protests about its transparency, and never thought to perform a simple file analysis that would, in a few minutes, have raised more than a few doubts. The industry then followed the vendor’s lead, for convenience, because it expanded the business – without weighing the medium- and long-term consequences for institutions and individual users. What is troubling is that even a segment of the open-source industry went with the flow, and continues to do so, as shown by the fact that today only two open-source office suites – LibreOffice and Collabora Office – use ODF as their native file format.
If between 2006 and 2008 everyone had done their part, today there would be a single open, multi-vendor interoperability standard for office documents – our ODF – governed neutrally and implemented by all. Everyone would have benefited, because document exchange based on a true standard is completely transparent and independent of operating system and application software. Microsoft could have kept its own internal proprietary format as a mere implementation detail, invisible to users, because documents would have flowed seamlessly through the standard. An ideal world that never became reality.
Instead, the accelerated standardization of OOXML through ISO in 2008, against all technical objections, produced the OOXML Transitional format we use today: a temporary compatibility mode, explicitly defined as a bridge to be crossed once and then dismantled. It was not dismantled. It became the only variant used, at every level, by the majority of office suites. Today the vast majority of office documents worldwide – including the public documents of public institutions and of governments everywhere – are saved in a format that its own designers had declared provisional.
Even OOXML Strict would not solve the problem. Microsoft has never promoted it – part, as we have explained, of an understandable strategy – and none of those who were supposed to oversee the process ever requested or verified its implementation by the deadlines promised at standardization, from 2010 onward. But the deeper point is this: Strict is simply a different variant of the same single-vendor format. A standard is not open because its specification has been published. It is open when it is developed through a transparent process that no single company can control, and maintained by an independent community of users and implementers. Replacing Transitional with Strict changes the variant but leaves governance – which is what determines sovereignty – exactly where it was.
So when we advocate for ODF, we are not criticizing anything. We are trying to clarify a problem that was artificially created, and to ask why a problem that was artificially created is treated by most stakeholders – organizations, governments, companies and individuals – as an established fact of nature.
Attention to digital sovereignty is growing, even if resistance remains strong, because awareness of this issue – which should never have arisen in the first place – is still virtually nonexistent, not only among users but among industry professionals themselves.
We continue to believe ODF can regain the role it should have had after 2006, when it was approved – rightly – as an ISO standard, because it had every characteristic of an open standard. The Deutschland Stack restores that role to ODF, and we hope the German government’s decision will not remain isolated.
