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

[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

[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.

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".

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

[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).

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.

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.