Simon

Cumbria

IT

"Where it all may go badly wrong, however, is when the interoperability that business and the public sector desires is poorly engineered, because one solution or licensing model is mandated to the exclusion of another which may offer much greater flexibility and lower costs."

Sounds like a hint at the Open Document debate.

On the one hand we now have several large users mandating an OPEN standard for their documents - effectively saying that "it's OUR data and we want it in a format we have some expectation of not tying us to a single vendor".

On the other hand there are 'certain vested interests' slagging off Open Document because "our format is richer". And of course, a certain vendor refusing to support the open standard because it thinks it has enough market share to force the issue. Just to muddy the issue, the very same vendor is using it's usual tactics of claiming to be 'open' because it uses XML - even though the XML schema is no less proprietry than it's previous non-XML formats.

The choice here is simple, go standard, or go proprietry lock in. Thanksfully people are now realising what the lock-in option means and are demanding the standards based route.

OK, so Open Document might not be the bees-knees - if so then we can discuss that and come up with a revised, improved version. But it allows us, as the article sort of hints at, to determine what software we will use in a few years time - rather than using what a single vendors tells us we are going to use.