SunMink

Simon Phipps's other Weblog
(a WebMink in the Sun)

A Study in Framing

There's framing going on and it's not pretty. Since I wrote my piece on Massachusetts and OpenDocument, it's been subject to plenty of comment both here and on Groklaw. In addition, Tim Bray has posted the speaking points Microsoft is using against OpenDocument. In all of these, under the surface is an act of framing that needs exposing and nipping in the bud. Here it is in Microsoft's speaking points (saying OpenOffice instead of OpenDocument is not a typo):

However, limiting the document formats to the OpenOffice format is unnecessary, unfair and gives preferential treatment for specific vendor products, and prohibits others.

Here it is, far more subtly, in Mike Champion's comment to my last posting:

The hard part in Massachusetts will be to get all those folks who have been "liberated" productively up and running on a new and (currently) unfamiliar system, and to keep them happy in a world where innovation is continuous and user expectations are ever-rising.

and here on his own blog:

This has generated a lot of weblog posts, mostly from open source advocates or employees of Microsoft competitors fulsomely praising it and hoping that this political decision will give their preferred technologies more economic clout.

and here in his group blog (my, he's prolific and subtle):

That's exactly what Massachusetts wants to have the freedom to do; but XML makes it possible today, and Microsoft's commitment to XML in products such as Office (and Sun's commitment in OpenOffice) makes it easy for our customers to reap and share these benefits, with or without universal document format standards such as ODF purports to be.

And here it is, crudely, in the blog of Microsoft's glove puppet PFF:

Massachusetts is on the verge of adopting a policy designed to force both state workers and people dealing with the state to use open source software programs as opposed to proprietary ones.

All these (and more, watch for it now I've mentioned it) want you to approach the discussion from the perspective this is Microsoft vs OpenOffice.org, Microsoft vs Sun, Microsoft vs Free Software - in other words, they want to frame the conversation as company competitive when it's nothing of the sort. Massachusetts are not mandating OpenOffice.org or any other specific product. If Microsoft would stop and listen for a split second, they would see they could trivially comply with what Bob Sutor explains is their customer's reasonable and necessary requirement for an open document format and add support to Office like they have for countless other file formats. The argument is not company competitive, it's about end-user freedom.

Claiming OpenDocument is open-source-only is an act of framing. IBM has a closed-source product that supports the format and we'll see more. If you hear this frame, break it straight away.

Posted by webmink ( Sep 12 2005, 01:07:24 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [2]