Govt on ODF: Looks good, is bad

If the South African government asked me to recommend whether to enforce a standard document format across all its departments, and if so, which standard to choose, I’d unhesitatingly respond, “yes,” and “Open Document Format“.

However, this decision would be based on functional requirements, such as whether the data would be accessible independent of particular software choices, whether the format is human-readable, whether it could integrate with other systems, and whether, in future, other software from other vendors might be able to read it.

The government reached the same decision, but some of its reasons are horribly misguided. The standards document the government produced (PDF) declares that standards for interoperability are to be preferred according to their “degree of openness”. The quality of being an “open standard” is then defined:

• It should be maintained by a non-commercial organization
• Participation in the ongoing development work is based on decisionmaking processes that are open to all interested parties.
• Open access: all may access committee documents, drafts and completed standards free of cost or for a negligible fee.
• It must be possible for everyone to copy, distribute and use the standard free of cost.
• The intellectual rights required to implement the standard (e.g. essential patent claims) are irrevocably available, without any royalties attached.
• There are no reservations regarding reuse of the standard.
• There are multiple implementations of the standard

This strikes me as a very badly misguided definition. Not even Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation, believes software must be “free” as in “free beer” (though if it is, all the better, of course).

Yet the government’s specification is full of references to “non-commercial”, “free of cost” and “without any royalties”.

It is, of course, perfectly within its rights to specify a functional requirement for an open standard. But demanding that it is free, that it is maintained by a non-commercial organisation, that all intellectual property is given away for free, is going way beyond any reasonable, functional definition of “open standard”.

It excludes any supplier that provides software conforming to perfectly open, accessible, and functionally satisfactory standards, but does so for a fee. It might even end up excluding all those open source developers who spent their twenties toiling away for free in the vain hope that one day, they’d get to pay for their sports cars and luxury homes from support revenue.

Someone is going to get very, very badly burnt if this is how government thinks about software. Last time I checked, you evaluated benefits and weighed them up against costs, to arrive at a purchasing decision. This makes zero cost — at least for a significant subset of software — part of the required benefit. Granted, it is a neat way to ensure that all government software deals will, in future, have an infinitely high benefit to cost ratio by definition.

Microsoft has already lost the battle to have its own horrible (and horribly named) document format accepted as a standard. South Africa’s own standards bureau were among those that advised the International Standards Organisation not to ratify it.

But if Microsoft — or any other commercial software supplier — takes legal action for being unjustly excluded from government business because of this deluded document, they’d be fully justified, in my humble, faux-lawyerly opinion.