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

Clue bat achievement unlocked

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice to see Govmnts getting a clue

Re:Clue bat achievement unlocked

[Anonymous Coward]

But impression's are all that matter to those in charge it would seem no?

Re:Clue bat achievement unlocked

[Anthony Mouse]

That isn't what the GP said. The trouble is that Microsoft Office doesn't implement ISO OOXML, it deviates from it significantly. It's like saying that Active Directory is an open standard because it's a lot like Kerberos.

Re:Clue bat achievement unlocked

[Anthony Mouse]

That's how credibility works. If you go 60 years and every time you say something is a standard, everybody agrees that it is a standard, you get credibility -- when you say something is an open standard then everyone believes you without having to independently verify it. As soon as you start allowing companies to strong arm you into applying your imprimatur to whatever they want, nobody can blindly defer to your judgment anymore, because they have to start carving out exceptions for your mistakes.

This article is a case in point. Suppose the UK wants only actual, implementable-by-anyone open standards. They can't just say "open standards are what ISO says they are" anymore and still get the desired result, because that saddles them with the non-open OOXML transitional standard. In order to solve that problem they would have to muck about trying to define "open standards" without reference to ISO in a way that encompasses 99.9% of what ISO does but weeds out the ones influenced by strong arming, and then you run into definitional false negatives and false positives etc.

The alternative is to start with ISO and maintain an exclusion list and add all of the non-open standards to it, but at that point you have to evaluate everything ISO publishes and whoever is maintaining the exclusion list is effectively standing in for the standards body.

In either case the purpose behind the corrupted standards organization is greatly eroded because people can no longer rely on its output, and many resources are wasted contending with their mistakes.

Glad they focussed on standards

[MysteriousPreacher]

It's a good decision. Open or closed source doesn't matter. What's important is interoperability. To give you an example, around eight years ago the local council website was unusable with anything except IE on Windows. It wasn't that the site was complicated. The issue was that they did a bad job of coding it, and only tested it with IE. That kind of thing shouldn't ever happen.

Re:Glad they focussed on standards

[flemmingbjerke]

Yes, it is a good decision. But, an important caveat must taken in relation to process that lay down the standard. Microsoft succeeded in making their OOXML an open ISO-standard. But, MS still controls its development thus setting the terms of standardisation in accordance with MS's development interests. This is a hollowing out of open standards through mixing them with "de facto proprietary open standards".

They get it at least.

[unity100]

some here still dont get it. something being made open, but owned by someone and can be reverted back is NOT open. it only means it is 'open to look inside',in manner of speaking.

open should mean what u.k. govt., in an unexpected streak of common sense, explains above.

I'll believe it having any impact when I see it

[jimicus]

It remains to be seen if things will change drastically with this government, but if the last government was anything to go by they'll find a way around it in order to use whatever they damn well please - and if that's Office, so be it.

Off the top of my head, I can picture:

• "It's only guidance, we're not obliged to follow it."
• "We only said the IP must be royalty free. We didn't say there couldn't be other conditions attached." (spoken as Microsoft announce a program which will allow anyone to implement MS-XML royalty free on condition that it's implemented in a closed-source, commercial product with no code inherited from any open source project even if the licensing of the project would otherwise allow it. IOW "By all means write your own office app which reads our file format, but you'll have to start from scratch and you won't be able to gain mindshare by giving it away for free")
• "Read the small print carefully. We're allowed to ignore this guidance if there is no viable product which uses open standards. Our conditions for "viable product" include "Offers the best compatibility on the market with our existing couple of million documents in .doc format""

Re:I'll believe it having any impact when I see it

[mounthood]

"We only said the IP must be royalty free. We didn't say there couldn't be other conditions attached." (spoken as Microsoft announce a program which will allow anyone to implement MS-XML royalty free on condition that it's implemented in a closed-source, commercial product with no code inherited from any open source project even if the licensing of the project would otherwise allow it. IOW "By all means write your own office app which reads our file format, but you'll have to start from scratch and you won't be able to gain mindshare by giving it away for free")

It's like you held a mirror up to the Oracle-Java-Apache problem. 'We only said you can implement Java openly if you use the test suite, which you can't use openly.'

Re:Why just Open Standards?

[Anonymous Coward]

> Why just Open Standards? What about those other – "de facto" – standards?

I think you missed the following facts:

a) the important discussion here is around the "open" concept -- "de facto" are not necessarily open -- what implies there are good and bad "de facto" standards;
b) "de facto" standards fail to meet a series of requirements to be even considered standards, so they might even disqualify as options from the start -- being open or not.

Re:Open standards means using Microsoft Office

[TheRaven64]

You're fighting the wrong battle. Instead, let them mandate OOXML, but require that any software purchases designed for editing OOXML documents pass Microsoft's OOXML compliance suite with no failures. Last time I checked, MS Office got about 5,000 failures - OOXML and Microsoft's file formats are not the same thing, even though they're superficially similar and MS Office claims to use OOXML.