Beijing Redflag CH2000 Software, a major participant in OpenOffice.org development, hosted the first "OpenOffice.org International Summit" on May 15th in Beijing, China. Sun's own Michael Bemmer, Director of Software for OOo (a cute acrynom for OpenOffice.org) from Germany, and Louis Suarez-Potts, OOo Community Manager, spoke on OOo and FOSS (Free Open Source Software).

A roomful of ~100 peoplen were in the audience, Governmental luminaries lined the first row, and press walled the back. Dr. NI GuangNan (倪光南, China Acadamia of Science Fellow) revealed that UOF (Unified Office document Format) has been approved as a China national standard..

Open standards encourages competition at the right level, prevents unfair advantages of monopolies, and benefits society in general. Both UOF and ODF are open. They are XML-based. Their governing organizations and processes are open to all: vendors, customers, and individuals. There is no hidden IPs that demands royalties. The formats are stable. No single entity can change it and make it incompatible with the previous version or competiting products. If you save in one of these format, your grand-kids will be able to open it.

Many parties have studied the interoperatibility of UOF and ODF. Dr. NI was enthusiastic, "70% of the formats are interoperatible, 20% are similar. That makes it very feasible to come up with a merged format." A converter is already available. RedFlag Chinese 2000, based on OpenOffice, supports both formats. Sun's Michael Bemmer and RedFlag's Mr. HU CaiYong (胡才勇, 红旗中文2000公司总经理) signed an agreement to collbaborate. No doubt formating is one of the areas to work together.

Microsoft knew that the empire of monopolized software is collapsing. The free and open alternatives to Windows and Office are gaining momentum. Linux, Solaris, OpenOffice, Mozilla, Google, etc. are chipping away the marketshare, and eroding the revenue even faster. Microsoft now offer deep discounts just to maintain their biggest customers and platform vendors. When countries and enterprises demand documents in one of the open formats, Microsoft loses its last leverage and must compete only on technical merits and prices. Wouldn't that be nice?

And Microsoft now seems desperate. They offer even deeper discounts to more customers. They also hinted that they will sue: even their own customers. The summit participants, many of them movers and shakers of this country, were perplexed, "Are they going to sue China?"