JDF: have the Networked Graphic Production partners become the Tech ModelRailroad Club of the printing industry? One way or another, everyone wants to know where the locomotive is heading

Print Action, Nov 2003 by Robinson, Jon

Jean-Francois Cuillerier is the vice president of technology and customer solutions for Quebecor World. This puts him in the enviable position of seeing what technology is coming down the printing pipeline often before most even know a piece of software or hardware exists. His concern with today's most pressing technology issue is very simple: Quebecor World does not want to see the Networked Graphic Production initiative or any other initiative write proprietary JDF code.

"Just to make a parallel here, it reminds me of the Unix development 10 years ago when we had different flavours of code, and it's why we are really focusing to keep it open, it is very important," says Cuillerier. "Linux came out in the end but it took a while."

Well before Linus Torvalds - who wrote the kernel of the Linux operating system that spread across the internet and into everything from cell phones to supercomputers - there was Building 26. The Tech Model Railroad Club may have used its infamous Building 20 to run model trains and tracks, and to create its miniature towns and papier-mache mountains, but it was in Building 26 that this group of MIT students gave birth to the hacker.

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This is where an IBM 704 mainframe, nicknamed The Hulking Giant, sat. But it was 1959 and the computer was off limits to pretty much everybody. It didn't take long for the little geniuses to find computer-like electronic accounting equipment in an unguarded room of the same building's basement. A keypunch machine presented hours of play.

As the club evolved, its membership, which eventually included the likes of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, began to tinker with programmed data processors and ultimately invented much of the programming tools, slang and lifestyle of computer culture - not to mention its apparent first video game, called Spacewar.

One of the club's key informants was Richard Stallman, a celebrated hacker who worked at Bell Labs, where Unix was first developed. He was dead-set against the commercialization of the lab's technology and in 1982 began to construct a clone of Unix, known today as C programming language. Shortly after his Free Software Foundation movement began, some Unix hackers from Stanford and Berkeley founded Sun Microsystems. With the advent of the microchip and the local-area network, this group recognized the potential in running Unix on drastically cheaper hardware.

The resulting workstations were relatively cheap for corporations and universities which then began to establish networks and, as a result, several modified proprietary Unix platforms also took shape. As the 1990s approached, it became clear the proprietary commercialization of Unix was not going to work. The players distracted each other over the code and a company called Microsoft swooped down with its Windows operating system - reportedly with less capable systems but much more business sense and marketing savvy.

It wasn't until 1991 that Linux Torvalds, as a 21-year old in Helsinki, rebooted Stallman's Free Software Foundation movement. He posted free Unix code on the Web and invited other hackers to make it better, holding them to a promise of passing their own work on again. Torvalds created what many have called the largest collaboration project on the planet.

In June of this year, Microsoft somewhat reluctantly signaled an acceptance of Torvalds' open-source world by training around 140 of its own consultants in Linux. It was more likely Microsoft's reaction to IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Sun and Dell openly endorsing Linux earlier in the year.

"If Networked Graphic Production has the momentum, then by all means, go forward with it, have everyone get on board," says Thad McIlroy, president of Arcadia House. "Even if all they can agree on is a single tag to flush a toilet then that's a big step in the right direction."

At press time: 22 days after Graph Expo

Creo began building its Networked Graphic Production (NGP) model in the year 2000 to handle the workflow integration of CIP4's Job Definition Format, a standardized language for passing both production and management information. NGP was officially unveiled shortly after Creo invested more than $25 million to help establish the enterprise resource planning company Printcafe, in 1999. For the next three years, Creo branded NGP as its own solution.

Changing the Creo-owned perception of NGP into an industry-owned perception of NGP probably stands as the largest obstacle in the way of moving the initiative forward. The aim of the new industry-owned NGP is to open up a working JDF platform between as many partners as possible, so that information can pass between their software.

"Because NGP was a Creo initiative, competitors of Creo did not want to join," says Amos Michelson, CEO of Creo. "Once it becomes an industry initiative nobody can have an excuse for why they don't want to be open. If you are worried that your offering is not competitive then you want to be proprietary and to lock your customer into your solution. But Creo is a very confident company, and my guess is that all of the people that have joined NGP are confident companies that believe in their offerings."