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UK: Open Standards Must Be Restriction Free
Glyn Moody writes "There has been a big battle in the UK over whether open standards should be Restriction/Royalty-Free (RF) or Fair, Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory (FRAND). That matters, because open source can't in general implement FRAND standards (there are legal hacks that can be applied in a few special circumstances.) First it seemed that RF had the upper hand [.pdf], but later comments from officials cast doubt on that. Now we have the definitive answer from the UK Minister for the Cabinet Office, Francis Maude: 'The Government require that their ICT should be built on open standards, wherever possible, to improve competition and avoid lock-in to a particular technology or supplier. Fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND) specifications may present some difficulties for the open source software development model in terms of patents and royalties. To deliver a level playing field for both open source and proprietary software, open standards are needed.' Will UK government use of open source finally take off, or is this a hollow victory?"
Waiting for the "disallowing proprietary standards will impede innovation!" reply...
Where are the lobbyists when you kneed (I wish!) them?
While both discussions are worthwhile to have.
Opensource vs closed source and open standards vs proprietary they not the same discussion.
As archivist I am a full supporter of open standards but don't really care whether my software is opensource or closed... as long as I can still look at my archives in 10-20-50 years.
What good is it for anyway ?? Absolutely nothing !!
You're thinking of "war". Easy mistake to make.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
organised by Microsoft and their little weasels subvert this measure... Just ask Brazil about what Microsoft was up to in their fight against .odt usage by Brazilian government departments... Just remember what Microsoft got up to when the State of Massachusetts wanted to mandate open formats for documents... Just watch Microsoft start their little tricks to get OOXML manddated in UK Government because it's an ISO standard... a standard which is impossible to implement by third parties because of the legacy backwards compatibility required by the binary blobs that they were able to get away with and an ISO standard which should never have been accepted in the first place if it hadn't have been for Microsoft's behind the scenes shenanigans in perverting national standards bodies.
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
A good place to start would be with ISO. Few know that most ISO standards are licensed products: http://www.iso.org/iso/licence_agreement Yes, you technically need to pay if you want to use standard country codes.... *K
You're asking if Open Source will "take off" in the UK government but last time I checked Linux servers were already heavily used within UK government organisations (although, granted, Windows Server is also).
As archivist I am a full supporter of open standards but don't really care whether my software is opensource or closed... as long as I can still look at my archives in 10-20-50 years.
And how useful is that standard to you if no one can afford to pay for the license required to implement the software to read your archives?
Why can't open source be fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory? All of those adjectives apply to any open source license better than they apply to any proprietary license.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I don't care about open-source so much (despite being a heavy advocate for its use and even contributing myself). That's neither here nor there in terms of government projects and it's hardly likely to make a difference either way.
But when you define a standard, say a document interoperability format, etc. then you should damn well be able to do what you like to implement it, and shouldn't have to license anything or pay any money to use it.
I don't care if we standardise on Word 2000 format - so long as there is a way for EVERYONE, even Joe Bloggs who works in government department X and is sick of dealing with the software's inconsistencies, to knock up something that can do a better job because he has a copy of the standard and EVERY POSSIBLE VARIATION that could occur in a file like that. I don't care if he then goes on to leave government, start a company and sells the software he makes back to government - that's just healthy enterprise.
Schools have a "common transfer format" file for telling other schools which pupils they are sending there. It's a simple standard, works perfectly and everywhere and it doesn't matter one iota what software is on the other end. I've seen the file import straight into large management systems, and hand-edited some of my one to pipe through batch files. The point is that it's either standards-compliant or not. If my utility/application can't handle a standard-compliant format, then it's NOT standards-compliant. If it can, it doesn't matter WHO made it or how much it cost.
What I care about is that the standard should exist and do what a standard should do - be a definitive, complete, reference to a particular way of doing things that ANYONE can become compliant with. It really wouldn't matter if every dentist in Britain used a different piece of healthcare software (as they no doubt do for finance, PAYE, taxation, etc.) - if they stuck to the standard, it would all just work and then you'd have some true competition to get into dentist's surgeries form software companies.
Open source is another matter entirely, to do with transparency and code-security (both arguments of which have a point but are really things that matter infinitely less than just giving the locked-in proprietary vendors a kick-up-the-arse by making them deal with standards-compliant competitors).
Open standards, however, are a no-brainer. The only reason NOT to have an open standard is to give one of the bidders an unfair advantage. That's it.
Before I even consider your grammar (or lack there of) the answer is simple. They are still the worlds 6th largest economy. They are also the part of the european union, and has some say in how that is run. If enough countries in the EU say that open standards are required by law - guess what? All the countries in the EU will use open standards. Considering the EU is the largest economy, even bigger than the States. So yes, they are still relevant.
Population of 62 million. Imports of 750 billion USD. They do better on the Ease of Doing Business Index than the U.S., plus they'll probably be the last European country to sever ties with the U.S. as the E.U. moves to become a larger economic power than the U.S. and China. That's assuming the E.U. survives another 10 years of course (and assuming the U.K. stays in the E.U.).
By the way, that import statistic (probably the most important in this case) means they import nearly twice as much per capita as the U.S. In addition, their trade deficit is 10% of their imports. The U.S. trade deficit is 33% of their imports.
So yeah, their decisions on standards like this are pretty important, economically speaking.
The right to protest the State is more sacred than the State.
They're related in this case due to the licensing involved in implementing a standard that includes patented components. Under FRAND licensing, patent-holders pool patents and agree to license them in a uniform way, but not for free. This makes it impossible to distribute software that implements the patents for free, which makes the general way open-source projects are run impossible.
I suppose it depends in part on what you define as an "open standard" to begin with. Is something really an open standard if it cannot be implemented without paying patent licensing fees?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Actually, the Euro is legal tender in the UK.
If no one can afford to pay for the license required to implement the software then that you break the FRAND as the pricing would not be Fair and Reasonable.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
So you do care whether your software is open source or closed. Only the open source software will still be available to you in 50 years. It might be a bit of a PITA to get it back up and running again, but it's possible. It's even more of a PITA to do your own support, but it's possible.
Proprietary software support can be dropped at any time whenever it is no longer profitable to support, or even if people just feel like it, at which point you're SOL.
Actually, it's not.
Actually, it isn't. Banks and shops are not obliged to accept the Euro. Some large traders do, presumably at highly profitable rates, in the same way that US dollars are accepted in some countries. You will sometimes see goods priced in both currencies, but this is largely because they are designed also to be sold in ROI.
Opensource and open standards are different things
But closely intertwined. In particular "open" standards can be divided into two main categories.
Open and unencumbered standards where anyone can implement the standard without having to sign license agreements or pay royalties.
Open but encumbered standards where anyone can buy and read a copy but to implement the standard legally you have to sign a patent license agreement and pay license fees.
Of couse there is the further complication that thanks to how patents work it is impossible to be sure a standard is completely free of patent encumberenaces. You can only say that there are no known encumberances. Even being older than the typical lifetime of a patent isn't surefire protection in some countries.
as long as I can still look at my archives in 10-20-50 years.
And the best way to maximise the chance of that is to have the widest support possible for said standard. FOSS projects generally can't afford to pay patent license fees and even if they could the patent licenses are generally incompatible with major FOSS licenses. Sometimes FOSS projects implement encumbered standards anyway (either illegally or through basing the project in a country where the encumberance doesn't apply) but a few legal threats could easilly cause the project to pull the feature (yes you can go on using the old version for a while but as the underlying platforms move on that is likely to get harder and harder).
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
You forget, the Falkland Islands. Even more rock for the Queen and her subjects. One of the so-so B2 boards.
Consider for example what happen to Wi-Fi. The IEEE has a fairly detailed patent policy, and the Wi-Fi standards have been very successful. But after millions of cards were sold, CSIRO came out of the blue and asserted a patent on indoor OFDM that they said covered Wi-Fi. The resulting lawsuits have costed millions.
If no one can afford to pay for the license required to implement the software then that you break the FRAND as the pricing would not be Fair and Reasonable.
who decides what price is "fair" and what price is "reasonable"? Do I have to take someone to court if it isn't? How mutch time and money will that cost me?
FRAND is a joke. ban it.
Open and unencumbered standards where anyone can implement the standard without having to sign license agreements or pay royalties.
Open but encumbered standards where anyone can buy and read a copy but to implement the standard legally you have to sign a patent license agreement and pay license fees.
You're confusing Open and Free. You seem to think Open means Free. It does not. Open does not have any relation to fees other than they are fair. 0 fee is fair, and so is $100 billion per copy, as long as its the same for everyone.
Stop trying to project your agenda on everyone else by using open to mean something it does not. You clearly want 0 cost, so you want free, not open.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
They're related in this case due to the licensing involved in implementing a standard that includes patented components. Under FRAND licensing, patent-holders pool patents and agree to license them in a uniform way, but not for free. This makes it impossible to distribute software that implements the patents for free, which makes the general way open-source projects are run impossible.
Typical terms are: You can use these patents for free to implement this standard, as long as you agree that all your patents can be used for free to implement this standard. This is without doubt fair, cheap, and not compatible with GPL because of the restriction "to implement this standard". The problem is not the cost, the problem us the specific terms in the GPL license. Now of course some people will like terms that are free, cheap and not GPL compatible.
If no one can afford to pay for the license required to implement the software then that you break the FRAND as the pricing would not be Fair and Reasonable.
Right. A copyright term of "the rest of the author's life, and then another 95 years, and then until the start of the following year" is also officially considered to be fair and reasonable (in the United States). It's 70 instead of 95 years in the European Union but still officially fair and reasonable.
So that's the FR in FRAND for you.
Typical FRAND licensing doesn't imply royalty-free (that's what "royalty-free" licensing is). It's common to impose a few cents royalty per copy, or something of that sort, with the fee shared out among consortium members. That's how the MPEG standard is managed, for example.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Open source software means that if the original developer goes out of business, then somebody else can take it over. Also it means that the software can be ported to whatever devices people use in 50 years, instead of having to keep alive an archaic 2011 PC.
Open source has huge implications for archiving.
SURELY NOT!!!!!
$100 billion per copy??? If I download that please don't count it as a lost sale. :)
I doubt that the UK can single-handedly change either the policies of the major standards institutions (ISO, IEC, ITU, to name three in the computing field), or the meaning of words. "Open" refers to the ability to participate in the formation of standards, and the level play field of contribution and impact. Open-source means the co-operative ability of anyone to contribute to source. These are independent, and independent also of whether there is IPR (encumbered) and if so, whether there is a payment to license it (royalty-free). Confusing the terms is helpful only to those who want to confuse the discussion.
I think you're a bit too defensive about this. GP clearly laid out the distinction that there are open standards that are free and those that are not. He then went on to argue that the ones that are free are better, which is the question at stake in this article. You're welcome to disagree with that, but you're going to need an argument to do it, since he laid his views out fairly and clearly.
"FRAND" seems to be a neologism to make RAND sound better. The Wikipedia article for it has been created by a single purpose account. RAND means the same thing and nicely translates to "random and discriminatory" if you are the activist type.
Judges do.
Who said anything about copyrights? These are patents, and patents run out in a much shorter time frame.
Open source software means that if the original developer goes out of business, then somebody else can take it over. Also it means that the software can be ported to whatever devices people use in 50 years, instead of having to keep alive an archaic 2011 PC.
Open source has huge implications for archiving.
And that's where you make the thinking mistake.
If in 50 years from now the vendor is out of business I don't care because with an open standard I can just implement the standard in a new program and read my data anyhow, not only that but implement it in whatever we're using then.
Being able to read, write, and think hieroglyphs is moot when you have a Rosetta's stone and can just translate them to your own language.
In which case they should not include the term 'Non-Discriminatory' in the title as it is blatantly discriminating against implementations (such as open source) which are freely distributable.
If you give it a bit of thought, you DO care. If the only software that reads a format TODAY is closed and proprietary, will it even exist in 50 years? If you can come up with a copy and an emulator to run it on, can you come up with a license key?
If your software stack is all Free software, you don't need a key and quite possibly won't need an emulator. The Free nature of the software means you can legally keep copies in any form and format shift and port incrementally.
In which case they should not include the term 'Non-Discriminatory' in the title as it is blatantly discriminating against implementations (such as open source) which are freely distributable.
"Non-Discriminatory" means that the same terms are available to everyone, not that the terms have to work for everyone. What you're claiming is that the terms aren't reasonable, but the reality is this: for 99% of the world, FRAND patent licenses used in open standards are fair and reasonable, and the only reason they aren't 'reasonable' in your eyes is FOSS puritanism.
Good luck getting the whole world to restructure laws around FSF ideology.
So you do care whether your software is open source or closed. Only the open source software will still be available to you in 50 years. It might be a bit of a PITA to get it back up and running again, but it's possible. It's even more of a PITA to do your own support, but it's possible.
Proprietary software support can be dropped at any time whenever it is no longer profitable to support, or even if people just feel like it, at which point you're SOL.
If you actually need to ensure that some bit of software can still run 50 years from now, I don't care whether it's OSS or closed, your best bet is to try to make sure it can function inside a virtual machine, and hope that 50-years-in-the-future VMs or emulators will still support the machine architecture you're using. In 50 years, every language and instruction set used today could well be a long-forgotten joke. 'Doing your own support' is a bit impractical if it involves recreating the entire toolchain and system environment needed by your software from scratch.
A more likely scenario is that data needs to be preserved for 50 years, in which case the best bet is to ensure that it's stored in the simplest, best documented formats possible.
And we all know how much you like to watch movies about... gladiators.
In 50 years, every language and instruction set used today could well be a long-forgotten joke.
hey man, are you dissin' COBOL?
Assuming the EU survives another *one* year is starting to look like a shaky bet the way things are going at the moment.
It the rest of the life of the author plus 70 years not 95. And that's only for non-corporate authorship. For a corporation or business, it's 95 years from publication or 120 years from the creation, whichever come first.
But I'm not sure how many people consider that reasonable expect for those with a finger in the pie.
The irony in this criticism is that Ordnance Survey isn't open itself, which was the impetus for the creation of OpenStreetMap.
Furries make the internet go.
Sure they do. Of course, by the time they expire, the standards are 'upgraded' to include the use of patents that have just been awarded.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
how can you be sure the vendor is following the open standard without access to an open source implementation of it? If it turns out in 50 years time that he wasn't following the standard correctly, what do you do?
SURELY NOT!!!!!