The Foreign Office building in Berlin is a great place to reflect on big things that can go wrong in life. At first sight modern, it’s substantial and reassuring with solid panelling and tall, thick doors on vast hinges. It was built in 1934 and served the Nazis as Reichsbank HQ and the Communists as party HQ. A useful reminder how badly wrong things can go, and that we have to do what we can to prevent it.

Earlier this month we met there to talk not about totalinarianism but document exchange formats. Europe doesn’t like the economic effects of a proprietary monopoly, and fears its culture will be locked up the whim of suppliers. Pragmatists, often from Microsoft, which is pretty happy with the de facto standards situation in electronic office documents, argue that existing industry standards should be made open and accepted not imposed by do-gooders. Or as Jerry Fishenden puts it

Interoperability has always been about the practicalities of getting real, existing systems working with each other. It has always involved both de jure and de facto standards, new and old systems and those that have implemented different iterations of the same standard.

Jerry speaks a lot of sense. Jerry speaks for Microsoft. Does the freedom-loving open-source community (once denounced by a US Microsoft exec as “Unamerican”) find these two statements compatible? Here anyway is the declaration the EU group came up with in that remarkable building on 1 March:

There was strong consensus among Member State administrations on

• the necessity to use ODEF
• on “openness” being the basic criteria of ODEF
• and resulting requirements towards industry players / consequences for public administrations
• There is a general dissatisfaction with the perspective of having competing standards;
• One format for one purpose: Administrations should be able to standardize (internally) on a minimal set of formats;
• No incomplete implementations, no proprietary extensions;
• Products should support all relevant standards and standards used should be supported by multiple products;
• Conformance testing and document validation possibilities are needed in order to facilitate mapping / conversion;
• Handle the legacy / safeguard accessibility

See Blindside wiki on computing monoculture and if you know better please edit it.