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In a huge win for open standards, open source and the public, the
long-awaited UK government definition of open standards has come down
firmly on the side of RF, not FRAND. The UK government's approach is enshrined in an important new document defining what it calls Open Standards Principles.
Annex 1 provides definitions and a glossary, including the following
crucial definition of what is required for a standard to be considered
open:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Nathan Myhrvold is trying to rustle up a little positive PR for Intellectual Ventures (IV) by appointing a VP of Global Good
(although it's hard to see how anyone lumbered with such a daft job
title is going to be taken seriously anywhere.) You can gauge just how
touchy Myhrvold is on this topic by his rather waspish response to some
commentary on that move.
On
Techdirt.
At the end of last year, I wrote about the great service Barnes & Noble had performed by drawing back the curtain on one of Microsoft's patent lawsuits.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Since today is a Bank Holidayin the UK, I hope that a few of you might take the opportunity to make a submission to the UK consultation on open standards. This closes at 11.59pm this evening (BST), so you still have time to answer the online questionnaires for chapter 1, chapter 2 and chapter 3. Alternatively (or additionally), you can also submit something directly to openstandards@digital.cabinet-office.gov.uk.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Ten years ago, people were saying that open source would never be
able to best proprietary software. But what they overlooked was the
fact that Apache had already beaten Microsoft's IIS Web server offering back in the mid-1990s, and had never lost that leadership once.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
The problems of monopolies arising through network effects, and the
negative effects of the lock-in that results, are familiar enough. But
it's rare to come across an entire nation suffering the consequences of
both quite so clearly as South Korea, which finds itself in this
situation thanks to a really unfortunate decision made by its government some years back:
On
Techdirt.
A few weeks ago, I wrote
about how businesses based around giving stuff away were able to make
money by replacing far more expensive options. One aspect of that is
that open source leaves money in people's wallets. The other side, of
course, is that purveyors of more expensive options tend to lose out.
That's a pattern that is being repeated across different industries -
not just in the software world.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Yesterday I looked
at the first part of a long document that Microsoft sent the Cabinet
Office in October last year. Here I'd like to explore one of the other
sections, which is headed as follows:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
In my first two posts about Microsoft's lobbying against true open
standards, I concentrated on a document sent to the Cabinet Office in
May 2011. Here, I'd like to look at another, sent in October 2011
(available in both html and pdf formats.)
On
Open Enterprise blog.
One of open source's great strengths is that it is not a company.
This means that traditional methods of nullifying its threat – such as
buying it or causing it to go bankrupt – simply don't work. This is one
reason why traditional software companies have had such a hard time
getting their heads around free software and coming up with a sensible
response.
On
The H Open.
In may last column, I wrote about Microsoft's efforts last year to derail any possible adoption of ODF.
That's very telling, because in a way it's quite separate from the
issue of open standards, and it shows that one of Microsoft's chief
fears is losing the extremely lucrative office suite business. But just
how lucrative is it? An email from Microsoft that is apparently
circulating around the Treasury department sheds some interesting light
on this. Here's what it says:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
In yesterday's post
about Microsoft's lobbying of the Cabinet Office against truly open
standards based on RF licensing, I spent some time examining the first
part of a letter sent by the company on 20 May last year. The second
part concentrates on the issue of open standards for document exchange.
This touches on one of the most brutal episodes in recent computing
history - the submission of Microsoft's OOXML file format to ISO for approval.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
In my last post, I wrote
about my Freedom of Information request to find out how Microsoft had
been lobbying against true open standards that mandated RF licensing.
In fact, I made another at the same time, asking a similar question
about the Business Software Alliance's contacts with the Cabinet Office.
There turned out to be only two meetings, and one email, so clearly
the BSA played less of a role than Microsoft in this area.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Regular readers may recall that I was not a little taken aback by an astonishing U-turn performed by the Cabinet Office on the matter of open standards. As I pointed out in a follow-up article, this seemed to bear the hallmarks of a Microsoft intervention, but I didn't have any proof of that.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Here's an interesting development in the legal battle between Microsoft and Motorola in Germany that we discussed recently. It seems that Microsoft is worried that the German court might award Motorola an injunction against it, and so has asked a US judge to stop Motorola from using it in that case -- and he agreed:
On
Techdirt.
Just as companies often try to file their patent lawsuits in East Texas, so Germany is emerging as a favorite forum for patent litigation in Europe -- and for precisely the same reason:
On
Techdirt.
I still remember well the day in October 1994 when I downloaded the
first beta of Netscape's browser. It was instantly obvious that this
was a step beyond anything we'd had until then, and that it was the dawn
of a new Internet era.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
As regular readers know, there is a struggle going on between the
free software community that needs open standards to be RF (strictly
speaking "restriction-free", but usually called "royalty-free") and
traditional companies based on proprietary software that are pushing for
FRAND - Fair, Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory - not least because it will allow licences like the GNU GPL to
be excluded. The argument is that RF means that any claimed patents
within a standard must be made available at zero cost - and that, the
proponents of FRAND insist, is unworkable, since companies will not be prepared to "sacrifice" their patents in this way.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Like many people, I've been tracking
the steady ascent of Google Chrome - and corresponding decline of
Microsoft's Internet Explorer - for some time now. Just recently, yet
another milestone has been reached, apparently:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
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