Sun warns caution over Microsoft's 'standard' promise

By Alun Williams

Posted on 29 Nov 2005 at 17:26

Sun Microsystems is urging the state of Massachusetts not to be swayed by Microsoft's submission of Office XML to the Ecma standards body.

In a letter sent to Secretary Trimarco, Massachusetts Executive Office of Administration and Finance, Sun's head of corporate standards, Carl Cargill, outlines his concerns over Microsoft's recent move.

Massachusetts, of course, has recently lead the criticism of Microsoft and advocated the use by public bodies of an Open Document Format (ODF). It plans to adopt the OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) open file format as a prerequisite for new productivity suites from 2007. The OpenDocument XML format is also the basis for the open source OpenOffice suite, now at version 2.0.

While Microsoft has promised to submit its work to Ecma, Cargill emphasises that promises alone should not replace existing open standards.

'Just as an agency would not purchase a product before its actual availability,' writes Cargill, 'so too would it be a mistake to rely on a single vendor's promise to submit a new product to a standards body at some point in the future. The Commonwealth owes no less to its taxpaying citizens.'

He goes on to urge Microsoft to adopt the ODF in the next version of Microsoft Office, which is due in the autumn of 2006. If it did so, 'the state could be assured of the many benefits of interoperability based on open standards.'

He also warns Secretary Trimarco that tax dollars will be lost with anything other than an open format. 'This process should not end,' he warns, 'with the acceptance of a promise from those who seek to maintain a costly status quo, which accrues only to one company's bottom line and denies the citizens of the Commonwealth the value they deserve from their tax dollars.'

'Only after a specification has been approved by a broadly supported standards body - one that demonstrates acceptable levels of openness by being available to all competing products - should the Commonwealth consider including that open standard as one of its own,' declares Cargill.

Of course, when Sun begins talking about open standards, the issue of Java will never be far behind. While Microsoft has submitted its C# programming language and .Net framework to the Ecma standards body, Sun has resolutely refused to submit Java to a standards body. The reason? It would lose control over future developments of the platform-neutral language.

The closest it came was in the late nineties when Sun put Java forward for independent standardisation. After more than a year of work, however, and to the frustration of the language experts involved, Sun changed its mind and pulled out of the process, not wishing to relinquish full control.

Cargill's letter is reproduced in the corporate blog of Piper Cole - VP of Global Government & Community Affairs for Sun Microsystems.

'"Hooray, and Welcome to the party!",' Cole declares. 'Sun is pleased to see anyone move to join the open standards community. However, there is a lot to be done between a press release and the realization of a truly open standard, and Office XML is far from being an open standard now.'

What submission to a standards body means is that any future changes have to be agreed, via a members-based technical committee and not at the whim of the company. Microsoft's move is clearly a means to try and reassure the wider world that the move to an XML-based document system will indeed be open and not subject to Microsoft-inspired 'extensions'.