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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?"
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.
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?