EU Wants To Redefine "Closed" As "Nearly Open"

Glyn Moody writes "A leaked copy (PDF) of Version 2 of the European Interoperability Framework replaces a requirement in Version 1 for carefully-defined open standards by one for a more general 'openness': 'the willingness of persons, organizations or other members of a community of interest to share knowledge and to stimulate debate within that community of interest.' It also defines an 'openness continuum' that includes 'non-documented, proprietary specifications, proprietary software and the reluctance or resistance to reuse solutions, i.e. the "not invented here" syndrome.' Looks like 'closed' is the new 'open' in the EU."

Comments

Re:How hard is it?

[danlip]

not sure how "open" PDF really is but its pretty universal

Wikipedia says "Formerly a proprietary format, PDF was officially released as an open standard on July 1, 2008, and published by the International Organization for Standardization as ISO/IEC 32000-1:2008". It also says Adobe has patents on it "but licenses them for royalty-free use in developing software complying with its PDF specification".

even if that wasn't the case there has long been a lot of fully compatible implementations of it (unlike Word).

Re:How hard is it?

[registrar]

PDF is pretty open, but that's not open enough for my liking. The standard mandates that any implementation honour the dopier "protections" in PDF documents ("Conforming readers shall respect the intent of the document creator by restricting user access to an encrypted PDF file according to the permissions contained in the file.") Honour them means you're bound to write a stupid implementation of DRM; fail to honour them and you get sued.

For example, I have a PDF file on my computer for which I do not have permission to save a copy (or print, etc.). That's right, I don't have permission to save the file. Fortunately I have a ready work-around for "saving" the file (i.e. copy it within the Finder), but seeing the Finder itself is (or, embeds) a capable PDF reader, I wonder if Apple isn't in violation of the standard by allowing their OS (which can interpret PDFs) to copy such files.

A file format is a structure for exchanging information between programs; a standard should be limited to describing that structure. The problem is that Adobe &c have extended the notion of "file format" to cover their intentions for behaviour of programs making use of that format.

Now I really wouldn't care if there was simply some kind of branding/trademark that allowed Adobe and mates to honour DRM within PDF readers and writers. If I want to make my own PDF reader/writer that doesn't fully honour the standard, then I have the option and can't use the trademark... but the fact that patents could be used to enforce the intent of the standard author means that the standard is not open enough. The GP's requirement needs to be that the standard not be patent encumbered in any way whatsoever.

Re:They don't say what you accuse them of saying

[Wannabe Code Monkey]

Do you not see that by distorting their words to advance your own agenda, and attributing to them malicious intent without any basis in fact, you undermine the very cause which you pretend to champion? Is that what you want to do? Do you really want to undermine the credibility of those who advocate for free and open standards, especially in the public sector?

Thank you. I would have modded you as Informative, but you're already at 5, and I wanted to respond anyway. I'm getting really sick at how often not just the headline is inflammatory and just plain wrong, but even the summary. I can't believe how far some people will go to twist the true nature of a thing until they can claim it stands for its exact opposite. What's even worse is that it gets by people whose only job is to check this stuff out before posting it to the front page of a widely read website. If this is the answer to print journalism dying, then maybe I should start up a subscription to my local newspaper, because the alternative is apparently much worse.

Also, I turned off the classic index just so that I could vote this story down as 'stupid' and tag it as both 'badheadline' and 'badsummary'. I suggest others do the same. Next to just not reading slashdot anymore, it appears it's the only feedback we can supply.

Re:Well, actually ...

[Carewolf]

No, the article looks like a troll.

An openness scala needs to have two extremes to be useful, which is why it also needs to included the worst of the worst in closedness, which reflects the minimum of openness.