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

[Joce640k]

They'll use Microsoft OOXML ...?

Re:Clue bat achievement unlocked

[Alain Williams]

Actually there are no implementations of OOXML/DIS 29500. The MS .docx format certainly does not conform - although MS tries to give the impression that it does.

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

[Joce640k]

Yep. They'll just send the rep round, pay for a few lunches and it'll be "Microsoft office is open, too!" in all the meetings to decide which format to use.

Re:Clue bat achievement unlocked

[flemmingbjerke]

OOXML is ISO approved. Thus, it is an open standard according to the Procurement Policy Note

Re:Clue bat achievement unlocked

[Svartalf]

But there are no implementations that would not run afoul of MS' patents at this time. There's where the argument will fall flat on it's face- the definition is explicit and MS would have to divuge their secrets and make them available on a permanant royalty free basis. MPEG-LA should take note: they're not an open standard per that correct definition by the UK government either- and WebM IS. They're going to need to come up with an answer that meets this criteria because the saber rattling they're doing against VP8/WebM isn't going to go very far and they've now got a problem because they're facing TWO FOSS codecs that meet the UK criteria of Open Standards.

Re:Clue bat achievement unlocked

[Alain Williams]

Yes - MS bought ISO votes in many countries so that OOXML could be fast tracked.

Fast tracking is reserved for what are usually de-facto standards with multiple implementations. OOXML is not implemented by anything, anywhere; the ISO vote was a fraud.

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

[man_of_mr_e]

Active Directory conforms to the Kerberos standard 100%. But, it's more than just kerberos. Most people, and I assume that includes you, have heard 20 different versions of the situation, and have a wrong understanding of what happened.

Kerberos has a field intended for vendor specific data. Microsoft uses that field for AD, in conformance with the Kerberos specification. What people were upset about was that Microsoft did not (initially) publish the format of that field, which some people thought went against the idea of kerberos. BTW, Kerberos is not a standard per se.. it's been approved by no standards body. It is an RFC though.

ISO OOXML was changed by the ISO during the standardization process, which is why Office doesn't conform to it. They claim they're working on making it compatible.

Re:Clue bat achievement unlocked

[man_of_mr_e]

BTW, OOXML conforms to ISO OOXML transitional standard, but not the strict standard.

Re:Clue bat achievement unlocked

[cheros]

Umm, actually, they DID have a clue until the previous administration got in. They did all sorts of Open Source based work, quite simply to be cost effective yet safe.

However, about the first public appearance the New Labour leader Tony Blair made as freshly anointed Prime Minister was to attend the launch of Windows 2000 at the Microsoft UK offices, thus lending it government approval. At that point, the consultancies moved in and installed as much proprietary rubbish as they could get away with. IMHO, what happened over those years must have at least tripled the cost of government IT in the UK, so I'm glad to see that the current administration is trying to knock some sense into it at last, because it's a screaming mess.

Hurray - some positive news at last. Unless it's a ploy to get more free lunches out of Microsoft..

Re:Clue bat achievement unlocked

[Anthony Mouse]

Wow, somebody better tell the Samba people that they wasted all their time on version 4 because they could have just used any of the existing free implementations of Kerberos that follow the RFC.

I didn't say AD failed to implement Kerberos, I said that AD isn't an open standard -- it includes a huge pile of nonstandard stuff that anyone wanting to interoperate has to reverse engineer. That sort of compliance-in-name-only plus EEE is the opposite an open standard.

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.

Re:Clue bat achievement unlocked

[man_of_mr_e]

I think your confused. Samba is an implementation of SMB, not Kerberos.

Re:Clue bat achievement unlocked

[Rysc]

In the first place their binary format was a de-facto standard, not the new XMLized format.

In the second place, their format is so convoluted and broken that it should not be standardized as-is. All the complaints that exist about OOXML and how it's impossible to fully implement from the spec apply also to the binary predecessor. It's not at all standards-worthy since it cannot even be properly described by Microsoft's own people.

Some changes were necessary to avoid ridiculous situations. MS could easily implement these changes but simply chooses not to. If MS never intended to comply with the process by modifying their Office programs to fit with the written standard then why did they submit it in the first place? They knew what ISO was about and what they were getting in to. They never wanted a standard format, they only ever wanted to be able to tick the box on a requirements sheet that says "Format is standards-compliant?" which they certainly now do, no matter how untrue it is. It was a sleazy marketing gimmick.

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

[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: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".

Re:Glad they focussed on standards

[Runaway1956]

I would argue that open or closed source does matter. But, I agree that the interoperability is more important than being open or closed source. Personally, all other things being equal, I'l always opt for open source. In fact, I might sacrifice some feature or other attraction to get the open sourced product. But, I won't sacrifice that all-important interoperability!

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.

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.

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:Patents

[El_Muerte_TDS]

Yes and no.
The ISO spec is not gratis, but the ITU spec is gratis:
http://www.brooksandrus.com/blog/2008/11/15/yes-the-h264-specification-is-freely-available/

However, it's not the complete specification, it depends on some other specs which might not be freely available. So is a standard "Open" when you cannot read some of its dependencies?

Re:Patents

[Carewolf]

Even when software patents have not been allowed, H.264 and MP3 before has still managed to get patented in many EU countries. The no software patent clause only applies to small companies and private persons.

Re:Patents

[burisch_research]

Hear hear. The entire dependency tree of any standard should, in addition to the standard itself, be completely 'open' according to this new insightful definition. If that's not the case, then the standard should not be regarded as 'open' whatsoever.

UK Govt should take heed of this and update their definitions accordingly (if necessary).

Re:Patents

[mbone]

I am not a lawyer, but I do not believe that H.264 is (or is purely) a software patent. I would note that MPEG-LA claims a number of UK (GB) patents in its pool for H.264 :

GB 564,597
GB 630,157
GB 1,467,491
GB 1,487,113
GB 1,550,219
GB 0460751
GB 2,003,899
GB 2,003,900
GB 2,009,927
GB 2,009,928
GB 2,015,585

(there are more, but you get the picture). If these patents are valid, they could certainly claim intellectual property rights in the UK.

(Note : in the UK patent search system - the "REGISTER ENTRY FOR GB2003899" is

Title POLYMERS CONTAINING IMIDYL GROUPS AND SILYL GROUPS

which is curious, to say the least. I wonder how closely MPEG-LA double-checks and copy-edits the claims submitted to them.)

Re:Patents

[mindriot]

I think they mean EP2003899 (European Patent), whose title is "A Method For Extracting Direct Mode Motion Vectors".

Better deals

[MaikB]

As much as I'd like to think that this statement is genuine, I fear it's just meant to encourage Microsoft & Co to offer better deals.

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.'

FYI: JBIG1 now patent free outside the US

[Rick Richardson]

On 2011-02-26:

http://freshmeat.net/projects/jbigkit/announcements/583-jbig1-now-patent-free-outside-the-united-states

GDI printers, etc... include this tech. I.E. printers from HP, Konica, Xerox, Oki, Samsung, Lexmark, and Kyocera.

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.

Technical effect is bigger picture in same channel

[tepples]

As I understand the explanation of technical effect in the Wikipedia article, the technical effect of something like H.264 is that moving images with a higher resolution or frame rate can be transmitted through a given channel. Compare MPEG-2 at 8 Mbps, which can transmit the 720x480 pixels of DVD, to MPEG-4 AVC at 8 Mbps, which can transmit a substantially higher definition picture.

Re:Big Brother

[Anonymous Coward]

Because apparently the British desire for theatrics is less than your own.

Open standards means using Microsoft Office

[flemmingbjerke]

In Denmark, we have had a similar document passed in the parliament in 2007. It entailed strong disputes over whether Microsoft's ISO-approved document standard (OOXML) was open or not. The outcome still not clear. But, the danger is that Microsoft's OOXML actually becomes a mandatory standard. This could easily become the outcome of the British government's Procurement Policy Note. Bullet 4 says:

"Government assets should be interoperable and open for re-use in order to maximise return on investment, avoid technological lock-in, reduce operational risk in ICT projects and provide responsive services for citizens and businesses."

By upgrading to Microsoft's OOXML (docx, xlsx, etc), it becomes the most widespread document format. This implies that government offices must use Microsoft Word, Excel, etc. in order to:
- ensure interoperability
- maximise return (avoiding conversion cost with e.g. ODF)
- avoid lock-in to other formats (e.g. to ODF),
- reduce operational risk (i.e. the Microsoft security package connectied with the office package)
- provide responsive services (citizen and business use Microsoft's document formats).

(I don't say these arguments are true, but that they tend to be accepted politically.)

Making open standards mandatory may imply that Microsoft Office becomes mandatory!

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.

autoSpaceLikeWord95

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed.

To understand why, look at the following instructive example
from the original OOXML spec (not the ISO DIS 29500 but the really-used Microsoft format):

2.15.3.6 autoSpaceLikeWord95 (Emulate Word 95 Full-Width Character Spacing)

This element specifies that applications shall emulate the behavior of a previously existing word processing
application (Microsoft Word 95) when determining the spacing between full-width East Asian characters in a
document's content.
[Guidance: To faithfully replicate this behavior, applications must imitate the behavior of that application, which
involves many possible behaviors and cannot be faithfully placed into narrative for this Office Open XML
Standard. If applications wish to match this behavior, they must utilize and duplicate the output of those
applications. It is recommended that applications not intentionally replicate this behavior as it was deprecated
due to issues with its output, and is maintained only for compatibility with existing documents from that
application. end guidance]

Good

[HalAtWork]

So what you're saying is that the UK will be that much less capable of adopting software patents. They won't just pass a law that requires them to pay tons of royalties all of a sudden. So good.

Irrelevant

[pjt33]

I suggest you watch the documentary* Yes, Minister. Then you will understand the true significance of those words hidden in plain sight: "wherever possible".

* Maggie Thatcher's comments on it support according it this status.