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I have been asked to be one of a three person team representing New Zealand’s view on the draft international standard commonly called OOXML, at a meeting of the international standards body ISO at the end of February. OOXML is essentially the format used by Microsoft latest version of its Office suite, although not by earlier versions of Office.

Standardising the file formats used by office programs may sound a little arcane, but it’s actually rather important because a properly implemented standard would allow competition in the office software field, since people would be able to buy or download any standards-compliant program they wished and still keep access to all their documents.

There is already an international standard for office document formats. It’s the one used by a host of mostly free programs including Open Office. This standard, called ODF, was passed unanimously by ISO a couple of years ago. Now ISO is being asked to consider blessing another standard. There was a vote on this back in September, to which New Zealand voted No, as did the rest of the world by a narrow margin. I’ve blogged about this before.

The Geneva meeting is to work through the OOXML draft standard and see how it could be improved technically. After the meeting countries will have a chance to change their votes.

The New Zealand delegation will consist of three people: a StandardsNZ staffer, a Microsoft employee, and me. I’m honoured to be able to contribute to New Zealand’s efforts on this – it’s important for New Zealand and for the world.

I’ve been fiddling with Linux for a decade now. And, frankly, back then it was a total bear to get it working – you had to really, really, want to. Once you could get Linux to fire up, it was rock solid of course as it has always been, but the process of installing it was challenging even for geeks. Then you had to figure out how to get it to use your screen as anything more than a line by line device – Linux could and can do this beautifully and flexibly, but you had to know so much about your hardware and edit the configurations just so before it would go.

How things have changed! First Mandrake through the early noughties, and now Ubuntu are making wonderfully good and easy to install CDs of Linux. (Just a note to the side – Linux is just the kernel or core of an operating system, and you need a lot of other software to make it work. A lot of that software comes from the GNU project, so it’s more proper to refer to GNU/Linux. And that’s how the different flavours, or distributions of GNU/Linux differ – it’s all a matter of which additional programs are supplied with the kernel, and how it is packaged up for installation.)

Ubuntu was founded by Mark Shuttleworth, a South African man who made a lot of money in the dot com boom and has obviously decided to put something back. And with its latest release, Ubuntu has surpassed the ease of use of Windows in many respects – especially those annoying registrations and activiations, because Ubuntu is totally free.

The latest release of Ubuntu, which goes by the names 7.10 or Gutsy Gibbon, is very good indeed. It installs easily, and provides access to an ocean of free software, some of which is of the highest quality, through the menus. You can try Ubuntu without installing it on your computer, or you can install it side by side with Windows, or you can put Ubuntu on first, then virtual machine software from Virtualbox and re-install your Windows in a VM so it lives in a window under Ubuntu.

Ubuntu is a 700 megabyte download or a $15 CD purchase delivered from LinuxCDMall or Copyleft. Give it a go!

Last night I went to the first ever New Zealand Open Source Awards. This was a great evening. There was a big turnout, including some of the luminaries of the New Zealand IT scene – David Cunliffe, Rod Drury, Pete Macaulay to name just three.

And then there were the finalists. As a judge – not sure how that happened, but I was honoured to be asked – I got to see the complete list of nominations. I had *no idea* there was just so much open source going on here, and much of it is playing on a world stage. Getting to the shortlist was staggeringly difficult, and choosing the winners was – well, I hope all finalists are still talking to me!

But the real message here was that New Zealanders are making open source contributions. As one of the winners put it: just about all the big open source project teams around the world have a kiwi in there. The Australians present were kind enough to say we were ahead of them in open source, and I wonder if it’s something to do with our #8 wire mentality, or #8 fibre as David Cunliffe put it. There are some simply stunning projects and people and I was humbled to see the breadth and depth of what they are achieving.

Others have written more than I about the event. I’m glad I went. It was a blast seeing those innovative people recognised. And it was a damn good evening.

Finally, big ups to the sponsors, and particularly to Catalyst IT, who supplied so much of the time of Don Christie, Mike O’Connor (great MC!) and Chris Daish. And no doubt many other Catalystas whose names I don’t know. They look like they are doing pretty well – who says open source is bad for business?

Today on Radio New Zealand National I talked about standards for computers and networking and why we need them.

The capsule summary here is:

• Having no standards allows companies to charge what they like and kills innovation.
• Having two or more standards is much the same as having none.
• Having one officially-blessed standard means that companies have to compete on the excellence of their products rather than being able to lock their customers in. And it allows magic like the Internet to emerge.

Read on for my speaking notes, and as usual there are some links at the bottom.

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On Radio New Zealand National today I talked about the Firefox web browser – what it is, where it came from, where it’s going to and what you can do with it. Read on for my notes, and links (including how you can get your own copy of Firefox) are at the bottom.
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Have you ever wondered what it would feel like to win a great victory against a giant company? Especially if you were a software developer and you were up against the finest lawyers your opponents could afford? Listen to Jeremy Allison and the others in an amazing Groklaw interview taken just after the European court decided to force Microsoft to open up Windows to competition. If you have 40 minutes or so – or even if you don’t – it’s really worth spending the time listening to them talking about how they felt to win. Jeremy’s descriptions of the legal robes are a hoot as well.

Today’s news is that SCO has filed for bankruptcy. This is entirely deserved as I have blogged before. The alternative for SCO would have been to face a trial next week which would only have decided how much it owed the companies against which it has pursued abusive lawsuits. But SCO can’t afford that, not after its claims to ownership to Linux have been judged to be baseless.

Remember, SCO’s legal action is the thing which has been held up as the risk over using Linux over the last few years. SCO has never produced a shred of evidence that Linux was copied from Unix, and now it has been found not to own Unix anyway the whole thing is moot.

This outcome gives the lie to those companies who have used the litigation as a bogeyman to say that people shouldn’t use Linux. But the main point is that SCO has been arguing that it owned something it doesn’t and has been threatening people on that basis. And it’s been called to account for that.

Companies and government agencies no longer need to be afraid to admit they use Linux. That’s the real benefit – the scary witch is indeed dead.

Updated 13 September: Locations of some of the activities.

SFD is being held this Saturday around the world – which of course means in New Zealand first – and all most of us will see of it is bunch of friendly people pressing CDs full of free software into our hands if we go to city centres and some shopping malls. But it’s about more than that.

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Updated 5 September – the vote in the the world standards body is “no“. Sanity rules. Well done, everyone who has worked for this. It’s still not over, though. More below.

Updated 1 September – are votes being bought in the international standards body?

Standards New Zealand has voted “No” to the proposed Microsoft standard, OOXML. This is the Right Thing for many, many reasons, one of which I blogged a few days ago.

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…is there are so many to choose from, or so ran a sarcastic saying in the computer business back in the 80s and 90s. In information technology, standards are meant to define an official way of doing something so that software and hardware from different manufacturers will all work together.

Customers benefit from the competition that standards allow, and for real competition there needs to be a single open standard that all manufacturers can implement. We learned that lesson in the 1980s and brought the manufacturers to heel by requiring standards, and the explosion of personal computers and the Internet is the result. Unfortunately, it looks like the world might be about to go down the track of multiple incompatible standards again.

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