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

Posted by kdawson on Monday November 2, 2009 @01:41PM from the double-plus-ungood dept.

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."

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Re:How hard is it? by danlip · 2009-11-02 14:18 · Score: 5, Interesting

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).