Bob Sutor

I’m a bit tardy in reporting what happened last week at the Second International ODF Users Conference, held in Pretoria, South Africa. This was the first time I was ever in Africa, much less South Africa, and so I was very much looking forward to the trip. It did not disappoint.

What always strikes me at such gatherings is the passion of those who have committed to adopting ODF. You get people who have decided for all the usual reasons that ODF makes sense for their use, or that of their department, or their agency, or their government. We’re seeing interesting and varying bottom up, top down, and middle out patterns of adoption in different parts of the world.

While it was clear that many people at this particular meeting were also strong proponents of open source, the value of open standards and ODF, in particular, was stressed again and again.

My talk was one of the first on the first day of the day and one-half meeting. In it I gave a very brief history of how ODF attracted attention starting in 2005, spoke a bit about current implementation status, and showed a world map illustrating ODF adoption. I emphasized then, as I will now, that I was somewhat liberal in how I added countries to the map. If there was strong national or regional support in a nation, it got on the map. I did not include countries where there was anything less than a recommendation for a substantial territory. I based this on the adoption document on the ODF Alliance website.

In particular, the US does not show up. I suppose I could have stretched and included it because of the adoption in Massachusetts, studies in several states, and the very strong supporting report coming out of New York. Depending on what happens in the US elections in November, we could see much greater adoption of ODF and ODF-supporting software in the next year or two.

In any case, take the map with the following wish/warning: we need more countries colored in blue. Progress on this was made within hours when Carlos González, Venezuela National Center on Information Technologies, announced that ODF is now a national standard in his country.

Given the extraordinary waste of time that was the OOXML fiasco, it would have been easy for this meeting to devolve into something negative, but that did not happen. About the least positive thing I heard was that in Microsoft’s implementation of ODF 1.1 they are planning to use the ECMA OOXML definition of formulas instead of the more logical and forwardly compatible OpenFormula definition in ODF 1.2. Hmmm. This doesn’t sound like it avoids extensions and “embrace and extend,” as I heard, it just sounds like sticking some OOXML in the middle of ODF.

In the second half of my talk I discussed the IBM Standards Principles that IBM announced a few weeks ago. I’ve discussed them in detail here, so I won’t repeat myself. That said, I want to urge people to look at what was good and positive in the ODF experience and imagine how to extend them to open standards creation and adoption in general. Avoid the bad things in any particular other effort you may know of, while you’re at it.

The meeting wrapped up on Friday afternoon. That evening I flew overnight to Athens as an intermediate point on my way to Bucharest, Romania, where I needed to be on Monday for a meeting with analysts.

I arrived in Pretoria this evening in order to attend the ODF Users Workshop being held here on Thursday and Friday. I’m excited to be here for a couple of reasons.

First, I wasn’t able to attend last year’s meeting in Berlin and I was told by many sources that it was excellent.

Second, I’ve never been to Africa, and it’s taken me 50 years to get here. I only have two continents left on my world list, South America and Antarctica. I think it’s more likely I’ll get to the former than the latter.

My flight was from Washington’s Dulles airport to Johannesburg on South African Airlines. Delta also has a route from Atlanta, but Washington is closer to where I was starting. Evidently these flights sometimes stop in Dakar, Senegal, for refueling by mine was a nonstop. When I asked why we didn’t stop I heard answers that varied from the layover being done only seasonally to one about landing taxes not being paid. In any case, the flight still took almost fifteen and one-half hours. I slept for a good portion of it, though fitfully.

Once on the ground it took a long time to find my ride from the airport to the hotel in Pretoria. Whether he was late or somewhere else, let’s just say he wasn’t waiting for me any place obvious. This pushed the drive further into rush hour, so it was well over an hour before we made it to the hotel. Once there I connected with some industry colleagues from Google, the ODF Alliance, and Open Forum Europe, but I begged out of the barbeque dinner tonight. I was simply too tired, unshowered, and headachey to socialize much this evening.

I give one of the first talks in the morning. I’ll reminisce briefly about how we got to this point and then talk about things yet to be done for ODF and open standards in general.