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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?"
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.
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
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.
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.