IBM undeterred by setbacks to ODF adoption

You might think the steady defeat of bills in several U.S. states to mandate the use of free interoperable file formats might dampen the spirits of IBM Corp., one of the prime supporters of the OpenDocument Format (ODF). Far from it, said IBM's Bob Sutor, who sees the recent news as par for the course in the evolution of any open standard.

Last week, California became the latest U.S. state to stall or shelve proposed legislation to require its agencies to adopt open file formats like ODF instead of Microsoft Corp.'s proprietary Office formats. Similar bills in Connecticut, Florida, Texas and Oregon have met with the same fate, while Minnesota only passed legislation after it was changed from a mandate to use an open format to a call for the state's IT department to investigate the issue.

Massachusetts, the first and so far only, U.S. state with a policy on using open formats, shifted that position somewhat last year to order the adoption of plug-ins to enable Office users to create and save files in ODF.

In an interview earlier this week, Sutor, vice president of standards and open source at IBM, talked about ODF and Microsoft Corp.'s rival Office Open XML document standard.

IDGNS: What's your take on the defeat of legislation in several U.S. states, which would've mandated the use of open document formats? Is it a setback for the adoption of ODF?

Sutor: We've seen this before around open standards. Take the Web itself. It went mainstream in about 1994 to 1995. If you trace it back, the Web was starting in the late 1980s. It takes most technology standards between 5 to 10 years to become established. They start in committees, come into their own, and then commercial interests come in. Web services kicked off in 2000 and we saw SOA [service-oriented architecture] in 2004 to 2005. Now, no one doubts that SOA is big business. In the same way, if you look back at ODF, you can go back to 2003 or more 2005. It's still very, very early.

We wouldn't have thought it possible in 2005 that in 2007 there would even be any legislative considering of ODF. It's great that people are even talking about this in the first place. It's extremely early. Legislative committee talks take time. One year a member proposes something, they meet that year on it, and the next meeting isn't until the next year. In some states, like Texas, they only meet every other year. I certainly expect the legislation to come back with a vengeance in the next sessions. Also, government IT policy makers aren't waiting for legislation, they're making active decisions. Changes are under way. Minnesota's bill will give a strong lead to other states.

IDGNS: Where do you think ODF is at in terms of your prediction of five to 10 years for a standard to establish itself?

Sutor: We're at about year three or four.

IDGNS: It seems as though IBM and Microsoft are pitted against each other with ODF versus Microsoft's OpenXML?

Sutor: The only one talking about a feud between Microsoft and IBM is Microsoft. On the ODF side, it's not just us, but we're a such a big company, we're going to say something. There's nothing whatsoever about ODF that particularly enables IBM. OpenOffice [an open-source office rival to Microsoft's Office] benefits; that's not our baby, we don't control it. We've put ourselves in a position where [with ODF] there are all the potential benefits of open source. It's interchangeability along with interoperability so if someone doesn't want to use someone's software, they can choose to use something else.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.