Open Standards and Money
February 28, 2011
With the Oracle-Google legal hassle over Java code, we are keeping our eyes open for actions that might have an impact on open source. In “UK Government Defines Open Standards as Royalty Free”, we think there is a hint of an issue that may gain some momentum in the months ahead. The UK, with its slow but steady economic decline, is creating a situation where the UK government is going to want to have tight control over the money it spends. Governments are particularly interesting when it comes to money. Most of the talk is about everything except cutting government spending and eliminating waste. However, in this write up from The H Open, we noted this passage:
New procurement guidance from the UK government has defined open standards as having “intellectual property made irrevocably available on a royalty free basis”.
I like that word “irrevocably”. How often is the digital world “irrevocable”.
This paragraph also caught out attention:
The guidance goes on to further define open standards as ones which result from an open, independent process and that are approved by a recognized standardization organization (the W3C and ISO are given as examples). The standards themselves must be thoroughly documented and publicly available at zero or low cost and have intellectual property “made irrevocably available on a royalty free basis”. It is also required that they can be shared and implemented across a number of platforms and using different development approaches.
In our experience, the “open” angle is often a marketing tactic. IBM, for example, puts its demo system on a TV game show and sells as OmniFind 9,1, the Lucene open source search solution. There are many companies using open source for their commercial purposes.
Now the government wants open and irrevocable to work in the same semantic cluster. I suppose the “low cost” notion is understood as well. What exactly is “low cost”?
How practical are government pronouncements about “open” when Oracle and its duo of MySQL and Java is on the legal offensive? Will this sort of oracular approach send waves of change across open source search and content processing? Some government officials in the Middle East are having some difficulty getting their wishes transformed into behavior if what I see on TV is accurate. You can, at least for the time being, download the UK report here.
Stephen E Arnold, February 28, 2011
Freebie
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