UK Gov't Says Open Standards Must Be Royalty Free

An anonymous reader writes "The H reports on an interesting development in the United Kingdom's procurement policy. From the article: 'New procurement guidance from the UK government has defined open standards as having "intellectual property made irrevocably available on a royalty free basis." The document, which has been published by the Cabinet Office, applies to all government departments and says that, when purchasing software, technology infrastructure, security or other goods and services, departments should "wherever possible deploy open standards."'"

Comments

Patents

[TheRaven64]

Note that the UK does not regard software patents as valid (although the last definitive statement on this was made by the previous government, so this one may reverse it), which means that things like H.264 still count as open standards under this definition, because the relevant 'intellectual property' is not regarded as property in the UK.

Re:Glad they focussed on standards

[oliverthered]

Government defines “open standards” as standards which:
  result from and are maintained through an open, independent process;
  are approved by a recognised specification or standardisation organisation, for
example W3C or ISO or equivalent. (N.B. The specification/standardisation
must be compliant with Regulation 9 of the Public Contracts Regulations 2006.
This regulation makes it clear that technical specifications/standards cannot
simply be national standards but must also include/recognise European
standards);
  are thoroughly documented and publicly available at zero or low cost;
  have intellectual property made irrevocably available on a royalty free basis;
andAction Note 3/11 31 January 2011
  as a whole can be implemented and shared under different development
approaches and on a number of platforms.

Re:They get it at least.

[TheRaven64]

Huh? OpenOffice is not a standard of any kind, it's an application. ODF is a standard, which is controlled by an independent body and can be implemented without paying a royalty, so it meets this definition and any office suite that supports ODF can be used in accordance with this directive. So does MS OOXML, but, unfortunately, MS Office fails the OOXML compliance test suite, so it can't be used as an OOXML editor.