Some weeks ago I wrote "Everybody's Guide to OpenDocument" to explain, in non-technical terms, how the adoption of open file formats benefits the lives of all citizens, not only computer techies. A few days later, I received a request to introduce the problems of file formats to an unexpected audience, one that is highly skilled but not in the software field. The Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies is a prestigious public university in Pisa, which is located in wonderful Tuscany. Sant'Anna is specialized in both social sciences (economics, jurisprudence and politics) and experimental ones (agriculture, medicine, industrial and computer engineering). It also hosts the Group of Italian TeX Users and its annual TeX and LaTeX meeting. Outside of this group and the engineering department, the rest of the school does not commonly use Linux. The school administration recently has started to receive OpenOffice.org files, however, but Microsoft proprietary formats still lead the game there.

My invitation to speak came from the school's Laboratory of Economics and Management (LEM). Giulio Bottazzi, Associate Professor of Economics, works in CAFIM, the Research Center of Analysis of Financial Markets, which is part of LEM. Giulio always has worked in a scientific environment and, to use his own words, "grew up with UNIX". He almost exclusively uses free software, such as Emacs, gnuplot and TeX, in his work. Giulio had read my article on OpenDocument and wanted me to come to the school to talk about the need to keep industry standards truly open.

In particular, Giulio wanted me to talk about OpenDocument. He was interested in both the future--that is, the cultural and monetary costs of keeping digital data available--and in the short-term market impacts caused by barriers to transparent communication among users of different computer platforms. Giulio explained to me that this kind of problem is being analyzed with growing interest by economics researchers. However, to evaluate date properly, they need practical overviews, minus software engineering jargon. My task then was to make clear why and how something like OpenDocument could be relevant to people studying "management and corporate strategies, public choice and public policy, innovation and industrial history".

That's why, on November 10th, I took the train to Pisa, by way of Florence, and arrived at the school. Following Giulio's request, I had with me some 45 slides, of which only two or three actually dealt specifically with XML and OpenDocument internals.

Once settled in a very nice hall, I began to demonstrate for the audience how important open formats were right there in Pisa, more than four centuries ago. I was assisted in this by nobody less than one of the most famous Pisans, physicist Galileo Galilei. As the story goes, at the end of the 16th century, Galileo climbed to the top of the famous Leaning Tower of Pisa and dropped two balls of different weights in order to measure how fast each fell. Starting with this experiment, Galileo built the theories later exposed in his "Dialogue Over the Two Chief World Systems", which proved Aristotle wrong and was the beginning of classical cinematics and dynamics. The Leaning Tower experiment, as told in the folklore, is probably a legend. However, I pointed out to Giulio and his students--who has started wondering if they'd invited the right guy--that the truthfulness of the tale doesn't matter. What matters is we still can learn physics from the original version of Galileo's 1632 book. Even if it never had been republished, the first edition remains readable (if you know Italian, of course), because the data format--the alphabet--is completely open. This, I continued, is true with every book, from the Bible to Euclide's Elements. And the cultural and economical benefits of such openness are enormous.

Next, I explained what made this miracle of perpetual accessibility possible: a well-structured information architecture that humankind has had since the beginning of recorded history and risks losing today. We create, access and preserve information through the simultaneous use of three different things that should remain as separate as possible:

Some millennia ago, the distinction was quite clear. To demonstrate this point, I showed a picture of the Rosetta Stone. In the second century BC, someone used a chisel (the user interface) to save on a slab of rock (the support) some information in hieroglyphs (the format). The information equally could have been written on papyrus or clay tablets with a quill pen or stylus. Eighteen centuries later, as anybody who's been left with Betamax tapes in a VHS world knows, the analog electronic era mixed things up terribly. This happened partly because of profit but also because almost nobody realized what was at stake early enough. One of the best examples of this point is the 1976 Viking records, previously discussed in my OpenDocument Guide article. In short, due to format incompatibilities, many extant documents had to be retyped manually from printouts in order to be restored, simply because the old and new formats couldn't communicate.

The digital era, I continued, finally has the potential to set things straight again and make them a million times better. We have hard drives, floppies, CD-ROMs, DVDs, compact flash drives and so on. These supports all are pluggable directly, within reasonable limits, into different kinds of hardware. They merely act as containers of the same bits, which are arranged in different formats to store any kind of information: text, images, audio and more. Above all, any software program (user interface), regardless of its license and the hardware it runs on, could read and write the same format.

The central part of the seminar centered on the fact that almost all software programs are worthless if they don't have information to process, store and display. Locking up that information is the easiest way a manufacturer has to keep selling copies of a program, without really improving it, but it can be terribly costly for users. Adobe, for example, can maintain the same pricing strategy of FrameMaker, even if its development has been completely out-sourced to India, because of the product's proprietary format.

I also brought up some examples of how closed formats make a huge impact on private and public digital archives. One example is the Virginia State Laws declaring, due to a lack of hardware and software standards, that electronic records are not acceptable yet for permanent storage. Microfilm and alkaline paper are allowed, but they are much more expensive, not searchable with a computer and unaccessible from the Internet. Another example is a report published in 2000 that discovered most organizations hadn't even realized they had a data preservation problem. Those who were aware of the problem also knew the total cost per year to fix the problem would range from $10,000 to $2.6 million.

Open formats, or lack thereof, definitely should be on any economics researcher's radar, because they will move huge piles of government money in the coming years. Massachusetts state government may have received the most press in the US for its desire to move to open formats, but other governments are not sleeping on this matter:

During my talk at Sant'Anna, I also showed that OpenDocument already is being used and that any information stored in this way is available completely and easily to its owner. The slideshow I presented ran in OpenOffice.org 2.0, which uses OpenDocument as a default format. When I announced what I've found to be OO.o's best selling point for non-techies--its built-in ability to save in PDF format--one participant brought up all the trouble he had experienced when trying to do the same thing with proprietary software. At that point, I stopped the slideshow, opened the presentation file with WinZip and loaded the content.xml file in Notepad to show the audience the same text that was filling the screen only seconds earlier in the slideshow. The text was buried in a ton of XML markup, so I reassured everybody that while few people edit XML by hand, it's essential that the option remains possible.

According to Giulio, the seminar I participated in met all his expectations. It illustrated clearly both the real costs of using proprietary formats to archive or exchange information and the potential an open solution such as OpenDocument offers. When I asked him his professional opinion on the whole issue, he said:

Giulio concluded by confirming his belief that these issues are extremely relevant to our future. The unstoppable conversion of all services to digital technology makes information management and archival more and more important in every budget, from families to nations. Private companies operate for profit, and there is nothing wrong with that. However, Giulio said, "when we choose these technologies, we can't afford to put the interests of private, sometimes foreign, parties before the guarantees of freedom, equality and legality that a fair and liberal society must offer to all its citizens". In the future, he hopes to contribute to other initiatives and studies on open formats, so all researchers and FOSS users are encouraged to contact him at bottazzi@sssup.it. If you do, please let me know too.