BSA Wants Business Software Licences To Be Checked in VAT Audits

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.

What One Line of Code can Teach Us

Light Blue Touchpaper is a blog written by researchers in the Security Group at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory (don't miss the explanation of the blog's rather witty name). It's normally full of deep stuff about computer security and vulnerabilities, and is well worth reading for that reason.

On The H Open.

How Microsoft Fought True Open Standards I

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.

Of Microsoft, Netscape, Patents and Open Standards

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.

Microsoft's Open Standards Fairy Tale

Regular readers of this column will know that I often write about the issues of open standards and FRAND vs. RF licensing. One particular column that explored this area appeared back in October 2010.

On Open Enterprise blog.

EC Defends Interoperability, but Misses Bigger Picture

Here's an interesting move from the European Commission:

On Open Enterprise blog.

UK Open Standards Consultation Submission

Somewhat belatedly (apologies), here is the second part of my analysis of the UK government's Open Standards consultation. As well as a quick look at the remaining two chapters, I include my responses to individual questions at the end.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Open Season on Open Standards

The increasingly heated debates about the traditionally dull area of computer standards is testimony to the rise of open source. For the latter absolutely requires standards to be truly open - that is, freely implementable, without any restrictions - whereas in the past standards were pretty much anything that enough powerful companies agreed upon, regardless of how restrictive they were.

On Open Enterprise blog.

UK Government Betrayal of Open Standards Confirmed

Just before Christmas I wrote a fairly strongly-worded condemnation of what I saw as the imminent betrayal of open standards by the UK Cabinet Office. This was based on reading between the lines of a new Procurement Policy Note, plus my thirty years' experience of dealing with Microsoft. At the time, I didn't have any specific proof that Microsoft was behind this shameful U-turn, but Mark Ballard has, it seems:

On Open Enterprise blog.

Of Open Source and the European Commission

At the end of last year I reported on the worrying signs of vacillation from the UK government over its support for truly open standards. At least it's relatively straightforward to keep tabs on what's happening in Blighty; Europe is another matter - I find the labyrinthine bureaucracy and its digital shadow pretty hard to navigate. So I was pleased to come across the following page, entitled "Strategy for internal use of OSS at the EC".

On Open Enterprise blog.

UK Government Open Standards: The Great Betrayal of 2012

Back in February of this year, I wrote about PPN 3/11, a Cabinet Office “Procurement Policy Note - Use of Open Standards when specifying ICT requirements” [.pdf], which contained the following excellent definition of open standards:

On Open Enterprise blog.

Apple Abuses Patent System Again To Obstruct W3C Open Standard

Apple has been garnering quite a reputation for itself as a patent bully, for example using patents around the world in an attempt to stop Samsung competing in the tablet market, and bolstering patent trolls. But that's not enough for the company, it seems: now it wants to use patents to block open standards. 

On Techdirt.

Openness: An Open Question

Last week I went along to OpenForum Europe, where I had been invited to give a short talk as part of a panel on “Tackling “Societal Challenges” through Openness”. Despite my attendance, the conference had some impressive speakers, including the European Commission's Neelie Kroes and Google's Hal Varian.

On Open Enterprise blog.

UK Government: Open Standards Must be RF, not FRAND

As regular readers of this column will know, one of the key issues for open source - and openness in general - is what is meant by open standards. Too loose a definition basically allows the other kinds of openness to be undermined from within the citadel.

On Open Enterprise blog.

When in Romania...

Last year, one of the key themes of this blog was the battle over version 2 of the European Interoperability Framework, and its definition of open standards. As I noted in December, that battle was essentially lost, thanks to the following sentence:

On Open Enterprise blog.

The Rise and Fall and Rise of HTML

HTML began life as a clever hack of a pre-existing approach. As Tim Berners-Lee explains in his book, “Weaving the Web”:

Since I knew it would be difficult to encourage the whole world to use a new global information system, I wanted to bring on board every group I could. There was a family of markup languages, the standard generalised markup language (SGML), already preferred by some of the world's top documentation community and at the time considered the only potential document standard among the hypertext community. I developed HTML to look like a member of that family.

On The H Open.

Interoperability and Open Standards: Help Make It Happen

In a previous column, I mentioned that I was invited to talk at a meeting at the European Parliament about innovation prizes last week. That's not something that often happens, and I frequently get to hear about meetings only after the event, when it's too late, which is very frustrating. But happily here's one on the 16th June entitled “Interoperability and standards: making it happen“ that I've come across in time:

On Open Enterprise blog.

UK Government Promises to Go Open - Yet Again

Sometimes it seems like I've written the same story about UK government IT plans again and again. You know the one: after years of empty promises, the UK government assures us that this time is will really open up, embracing open source and openness in all its forms.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Kafka Alive and Well, Living in Switzerland

You may have come across this sad tale:

According to the Swiss Open Systems User Group, /ch/openSwitzerland, the Swiss Federal Supreme Court Switzerland has rejected a complaint by several open source vendors against the awarding of contracts to Microsoft without prior invitation to tender. Last summer, the Swiss Federal Administrative Court had ruled in a first instance decision that only the vendors of Microsoft software could object against the awarded contracts because only they offer the Microsoft products chosen by the Swiss Federal Government.

See the Catch-22 logic here? Only vendors of Microsoft software could object to the fact that only vendors of Microsoft could be awarded the contract...

The complainants had appealed against this decision on the grounds that the ruling didn't take into consideration the existence of products which compete with those offered by Microsoft.

And the court's reason for rejecting the appeal?

the court ruled that the complainants didn't provide conclusive evidence of the actual existence of such competing products. An objection by the complainants that such evidence is impossible to produce because no functional specifications have been established by the Swiss Federal Administration was overruled.

Got that? The complainants couldn't complain because they didn't prove they were able to supply the products desired. But the reason they couldn't do this was because no list of functional requirements had been specified - which was precisely the problem they were complaining about: that the contract was framed in such a way as to exclude open source alternatives.

It's a bit like being found guilty for wanting to know what crime you were accused of....

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

Open Source's Kith and Kindred

One of the things that interests me is the way that the ideas underlying open source are being applied in other fields. That's something that I normally cover in my other blog, but sometimes things happen in those other domains that have ramifications back in the world of open source, and so may be of interest here.

On Open Enterprise blog.