Saving the world one file format at a time
Published: 29 Nov 2005 16:45 GMT
When governments maintain their public records electronically, does a member of the public have to buy something from a specific company to read those records? The rational, fair, democratic answer has to be "no".
The Massachusetts executive branch agrees in blunt and perceptive language: "A public record, once stored electronically, must not require a proprietary computer program to read it; it should be readable by many different word processors, spreadsheets and other productivity applications, regardless of vendor."
Simple, isn't it? A public record on paper requires no one to buy anything. Everyone can read it. And it more or less keeps forever. That's a good standard, and Massachusetts will soon require public records be held in OpenDocument Format.
OpenDocument Format, unlike Microsoft Word's .doc, is a way to save electronic documents that anyone can read. The OpenDocument Format specifications are free; any competent programmer can produce a fully featured word processor or spreadsheet that will work with it. What's more, since no company owns the standard itself, forward and backward compatibility with former and future word processors is guaranteed.
No more: "Somebody upgraded, so now everyone has to." By making the "public" in "public record" mean something, Massachusetts gets better accessibility, plus competition — not a sole-source provider.
In biology, a monoculture — a singular species that supplants all others — is a bad thing. When every plant is the same species, every plant is susceptible to the same predators, the same diseases. Examples are as plentiful as they are sad: Consider the virus that brought on the Irish potato famine or the boll weevil that nearly obliterated the South's cotton crop in the US in the early 20th century, and you see the destruction that human-made monocultures bring upon themselves.
Computers are no different. Computer viruses spread efficiently, lethally when all computers on a network run the same software. MyDoom, Melissa and MSBlast were a function not of the Internet, but of a Windows monoculture. They caused havoc because they were designed for specific vulnerabilities of Windows. Since one virus generally affects one species of software, any computing monoculture poses a hazard the same way it does in nature.
Microsoft's monopoly in the market creates a Microsoft monoculture on the network. Microsoft maintains its monopoly and the monoculture through user-level lock-in, especially by keeping document formats as trade secrets. Massachusetts noted as much in its antitrust proceeding against the company. And so long as that lock-in persists, there will be no solution to the monoculture risk.
As a matter of logic alone: if you care about the security of the commonwealth, then you care about the risk of a computing monoculture. If you care about the risk of a computing monoculture, then you care about barriers to diversification. If you care about barriers to diversification, then you care about user-level lock-in. And if you care...
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3 comments
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Excellent article. Arthur B. -
Articles like this encourage 'able' virus writers... Samuel, UK
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"Articles like this encourage 'able' virus writers... Anonymous
