'Til All Are One

George Orwell’s clas­sic allegory, Animal Farm, presents many per­spect­ives on human beha­viour and soci­ety. One of these is how people can be led and manip­u­lated through the con­trol of inform­a­tion. In the story, the Seven Com­mand­ments formed a de facto con­sti­tu­tion for the Anim­al­istic soci­ety. Since only a hand­ful of anim­als could read, the rest were depend­ent upon what they were told was writ­ten. Gradu­ally, the writ­ing was cun­ningly altered to the bene­fit of the pigs above all other anim­als, and the popu­lace was taught to not trust their recol­lec­tions of what was writ­ten in the past.

What made this sub­ver­sion pos­sible was the inab­il­ity of most anim­als to read. The two anim­als that could read (aside from the pigs) chose not to do any­thing about what they saw. Amongst other things, the right to access and read inform­a­tion is an import­ant corner­stone of democracy.

This is where open file formats come in. As our lives become increas­ingly defined by elec­tronic records, there needs to be a way for inde­pend­ent view­ing and audit­ing. Paper is eas­ily read, but com­puter files require soft­ware to decypher them. Ima­gine if you needed spe­cial (and expens­ive) glasses just to read the let­ter that you your­self wrote only a few years ago.

There has been a fair amount of dis­cus­sion in the press regard­ing the Open­Doc­u­ment and the so-​​called ‘Open’ XML formats. The primary focus of this report­ing thus far has been on the polit­ical and tech­nical facets. This is slowly chan­ging, as the import­ance of long-​​term data pre­ser­va­tion and free­dom of inform­a­tion become appar­ent to ordin­ary folk.

The BBC has pub­lished a report on the prob­lem, and dis­cusses how the UK National Archives are attempt­ing to deal with it. Alas, it appears that they have opted for a short-​​sighted approach, rely­ing on vir­tu­al­isa­tion of older oper­at­ing sys­tems and applic­a­tions, through a dir­ect part­ner­ship with Microsoft. With this approach, the format decoders/​viewers (not to men­tion the oper­at­ing sys­tem and soft­ware per­form­ing the vir­tu­al­isa­tion itself) remain closed in source and spe­cific­a­tion, and one must deal with a cum­ber­some vir­tual machine just to view a document.

Where is the guar­an­tee that files can be read hun­dreds of years from now, just as we can do today with paper doc­u­ments such as the his­toric Magna Carta? How does this part­ner­ship bene­fit me, an ordin­ary cit­izen who might wish to view ten– (or even two-​​) year-​​old pub­lic doc­u­ments that are only avail­able in a pro­pri­et­ary elec­tronic format?

It’s both sad and frus­trat­ing to see that his­tory is yet again repeat­ing itself. Whilst the con­tents of the Domes­day Book can still be read nearly 1000 years after com­ple­tion, the digital BBC Domes­day Pro­ject was rendered vir­tu­ally unread­able a mere 16 years later.

Thank­fully, there are efforts to cre­ate an infra­struc­ture for long-​​term pre­ser­va­tion and man­age­ment of digital doc­u­ments. To start with, there are open formats such as Open­Doc­u­ment and PDF. The Aus­tralian National Archives have long been sup­port­ers of Open­Doc­u­ment, to the extent that they are stand­ard­ising upon it. Put­ting their money where their mouths are, they are build­ing a com­pletely open source (GPL, no less) data man­ag­ment sys­tem that any­body can use or improve to suit their needs. Michael Carden gave a great talk [Ogg video] at this year’s linux​.conf​.au about this tech­no­logy, known as Xena [PDF]. Whilst their UK coun­ter­parts seem to have for­got­ten that access to data is not just a priv­ilege for those able to make exclus­ive agree­ments with pur­vey­ors of lock-​​in tech­no­lo­gies, the Aus­tralian National Archives have been striv­ing to ensure that nobody is left out of the digital revolution.

Four legs good, two legs… bet­ter? Let’s pre­vent this sub­ver­sion from happening.

LotD:  Mex­ican ‘world’s richest person’

Microsoft have announced their Zune music/​video player to take on Apple’s iPod. Like Apple, they con­sider col­our to be an import­ant dif­fer­en­ti­ator in the mar­ket­place. With white hav­ing been co-​​opted by Apple, and black being the gen­eric (and hence indis­tinct­ive) hue, what does that leave Microsoft?

Appar­ently, it is brown.

Once again, Ubuntu is vin­dic­ated! What’s next, naked people?

In Janu­ary, dur­ing Steve Jobs’ Mac­world key­note speech announ­cing the new Intel Macin­toshes, Microsoft made a “com­mit­ment” to con­tinue to develop for and sup­port the Apple Macin­tosh plat­form. In true Microsoft style, they con­veni­ently didn’t explain how deeply that com­mit­ment went. Now we know.

Microsoft have decided to kill their Vir­tual PC product, remov­ing a vir­tu­al­isa­tion option from Mac OS at the same time that sim­ilar func­tion­al­ity is being fol­ded into Win­dows Vista. They are aware that vir­tu­al­isa­tion is quickly becom­ing a killer fea­ture, and they’ll be damned if they allow any­one else to have it. For­tu­nately (and prob­ably prefer­ably), VMware will be made avail­able for the Apple Intel plat­form. There’s also Par­al­lels, but they still do not have any server-​​oriented products.

In addi­tion, Microsoft will also be remov­ing Visual Basic sup­port from Office for Mac. If you can’t stop sup­port­ing some­thing, why not cripple it instead? Many busi­nesses are depend­ent upon VB script­ing, or exchange files with people/​organisations that make use of it, so this is a major blow indeed for Apple. Such a defi­ciency will be subtle: people will pur­chase Office for Mac expect­ing it to work with files cre­ated in its Win­dows coun­ter­part (or vice versa), and will be sorely dis­ap­poin­ted. This has already been occur­ring for a num­ber of years, but the prob­lem is becom­ing increas­ingly acute.

Ulti­mately, the best solu­tion is to remove our depend­ency on pro­pri­et­ary formats and lan­guages, for they are the root cause of this mess. Open​Of​fice​.org already does what most people require, and in some cases it does it bet­ter. It even has grow­ing sup­port for Visual Basic for Applic­a­tions. Open­Of­fice is truly look­ing like a bet­ter Office than MS Office. The Open­Of­fice file fil­ter­ing sup­port developers work hard to sup­port all the MS Office formats they can find (people have coun­ted over 20 dif­fer­ent ver­sions of the Word .DOC format alone), which is more than I can say about the MS Office pro­gram­mers, who are notori­ous for break­ing com­pat­ib­ilty with older ver­sions. Using the Open­Doc­u­ment formats (which are now an ISO stand­ard) assures that your data will be access­ible on many dif­fer­ent plat­forms for many years to come.

The main stum­bling block to Open­Of­fice adop­tion on Mac OS is the Windows-​​like inter­face and its reli­ance on X11 for dis­play. There is work being done on a nat­ive Aqua ver­sion, but in the mean­while there is NeoOf­fice.

Steve “Real­ity Dis­tor­tion Field” Jobs has delivered his key­note address to Apple’s World Wide Developer Con­fer­ence (WWDC). It’s amaz­ing what he would have us believe. Apple has appar­ently inven­ted vir­tual desktops. What does Microsoft have to say about it, given they applied for a pat­ent on the tech­no­logy in 2004 (com­plete with images ripped out of GNOME and KDE!)? Let’s just for­get that they have exis­ted since at least 1985, shall we?

That aside, I am heartened to see that OpenDar­win did not close their doors a couple of weeks ago in vain. Apple them­selves are spon­sor­ing Mac OS Forge, and in the pro­cess they have made read­ily avail­able the source code for Bon­jour, Col­lab­or­a­tion (Dar­win Cal­en­dar Server), Web­Kit (which is really just KHTML on ster­oids any­way), Launchd and even their XNU ker­nel (minus some essen­tial pro­pri­et­ary parts). They have even licensed some of these pro­jects under the Apache Licence 2.0. I pray that this sig­ni­fies the start of a new era of col­lab­or­a­tion between Apple and the FLOSS com­munity, and not just a cheap attempt to con­trib­ute the min­imum amount required to keep the bulk of the com­munity on-​​side.

So with Tiger being favour­ably com­pared to the forever-​​delayed Win­dows Vista, what does that make Leo­pard? Mac OS just gets bet­ter and bet­ter, while the Win­dows débâcle is far from over. With screw-​​ups such as this [video], it’s no won­der that Microsoft feels the need to prevent/​destroy all com­pet­i­tion.

Update (2006−08−13): Here is a much more sober eval­u­ation of the so-​​called ‘copy­ing’ going on between Mac OS and Win­dows. It puts everything into more per­spect­ive, show­ing that some of their killer fea­tures in fact ori­gin­ated else­where. It reminds me of a funny quo­ta­tion: “Mac OS, Win­dows, BeOS: they’re all just Xerox cop­ies.”

As much as Paul Thur­rott likes to claim that Spot­light is a copy of Win­dows Search, Apple had the same func­tion­al­ity in the mid-​​1990s with its Cop­land Pro­ject.

KDE4 devel­op­ment is under­way, and users and developers are hav­ing their say on how it should look. One thing that irks me is when someone posts a mockup of some ‘new’ idea, when in fact that idea is just lif­ted from some­where else. I have no prob­lem with deriv­a­tion or inspir­a­tion from else­where (that’s how soft­ware evolves, after all), but for ghod’s sake please don’t pass off some other idea as your own.

Take for example this mockup. Look at the file browser. Can you say Win­dows Vista? Some per­son, whom I pray is not a Kon­queror developer, was so enam­oured with it that he cre­ated an inter­act­ive ver­sion.

I’m not say­ing that it is unat­tract­ive, but I don’t under­stand why this sort of blind copy­ing takes place. I’ll admit that graphic design isn’t one of FLOSS’s strong points, but with that said we do have some truly innov­at­ive and beau­ti­ful designs. Amarok comes to mind.

I wrote this in response to a Slash­dot art­icle about the Win­dows spy­ware pro­gramme Gator:

PRESS RELEASE: MICROSOFT INNOVATES IN NEW VERSION OF INTERNET EXPLORER

Store all your pass­words, fin­an­cial data and other per­sonal inform­a­tion on a cent­ral server! Never again will you have to remem­ber a pass­word or PIN, since you can con­veni­ently access all your data from a Microsoft server*! Microsoft have made it so easy for you by upload­ing all your data auto­mat­ic­ally, no ques­tions asked! In addi­tion, we use our pat­en­ted Mal­ware™ advanced arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence to ana­lyse your move­ments online and offer ser­vices tailored just for you! To make this as pleas­ant an exper­i­ence as pos­sible, we even share your data with third parties so that you are only offered ser­vices that suit your interests.

“Microsoft has always strived to deliver the best value for money in the industry,” repor­ted Tom Rort of The Gart­ner Group. “Microsoft products pay off big time for me! I’d give this release a rat­ing of five dollar-​​signs,” said Mary Swindle of The Aber­deen Group.

Once again, Microsoft has shown its com­mit­ment to look­ing out for the best interests of its customers.

* cost of retrieval is $US9.99 per trans­ac­tion, and since Microsoft already have your fin­an­cial data, we con­veni­ently deduct the money from your bank account auto­mat­ic­ally.