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

[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.

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.

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.

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.