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?"

Comments

Re:Opensource and open standards are different thi

[jspayne]

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?

Re:FRAND?

[TheRaven64]

That would be fine. We're talking about open source, not community-developed software. This is government IT procurement, not your basement Linux server. The problem is that open source software, by definition, must allow unlimited redistribution (point one of the Open Source Definition). A one-off payment of £10K is fine, as long as that covers all copies of the software and of derived works. A FRAND standard, however, could require a 10p payment per copy of the software. This is impossible, because you'd be requiring everyone who distributed a copy of the software downstream to pay 10p to the standards body (or you'd be required to pay it, with no limit on the potential number of copies).