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As you may have noticed, open standards are a hot topic currently. One person who deals with them all the time in a variety of ways is Charles-H. Schulz.
That's because he's one of the leaders of The Document Foundation, home to the LibreOffice fork of the ODF-based OpenOffice.org, and he's also on the board of the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS). The following is an interview exploring his views about standards - open and not so open.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Back in 2009, Techdirt wrote
about an interesting challenge to a then-new law against counterfeits
in Kenya, on the grounds that it might be used to stop perfectly legal
generic variants of drugs being imported into the country. That
matters, because around 90% of drugs used in Kenya are generics, which
means that blocking them would have serious implications for healthcare
in that country.
On
Techdirt.
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.
Open Access continues to gain momentum,
as more and more researchers seek to make their work freely available
online. One way of doing that is by modifying the contract that
academic publishers routinely send to potential authors, inserting a
clause that allows digital copies to be distributed.
On
Techdirt.
As Techdirt has reported,
the London 2012 Olympics bring with them a range of "special" measures
guaranteed to make London a place for lovers of freedom to avoid this
summer. But it seems that the organizers wish to ensure that anyone attending will also have a rather miserable time:
On
Techdirt.
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.
Not content with inventing the Web and then giving it away, Tim Berners-Lee remains highly active in warning about the threats the Internet and its users face. Most recently he has taken on the British government's disproportionate plans to store information about every email sent and Web page visited in the UK:
On
Techdirt.
As if Italians didn't have enough problems, it seems that their government is trying to sneak through a proposal supposedly designed to provide those who are libelled online with an automatic recourse, which activists thought they had managed to kill off five months ago. Here's the plan:
On
Techdirt.
As China continues to climb up the economic rankings (it became number two
last year, in case you missed it) its domestic policy begins to have
wider implications for the rest of the world. A case in point is this
news from Slashdot about proposed changes to China's copyright laws. Two sections in particular are proving controversial:
On
Techdirt.
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.
As Techdirt reported
a couple of years ago, a hard-fought campaign in New Zealand to prevent
software patents being granted there seemed to have paid off, with a Patents Bill explicitly excluding them that came with the following commentary:
On
Techdirt.
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.
Last week, the EU Rapporteur on ACTA, David Martin, announced he would recommend that the European Parliament reject the treaty. He has now made good on that promise in his report, available in draft form (pdf):
On
Techdirt.
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.
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.
Last week we saw the Socialists and Democrats, the second-largest bloc in the European Parliament, turn against
ACTA. Combined with the stated position of the Green party there, that
means ACTA is closer to being thrown out when the vote for ratification
takes place in Brussels this summer.
On
Techdirt.
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.
As we recently reported,
ACTA has been dealt a serious blow by the EU Rapporteur's
recommendation that the European Parliament should reject the treaty.
In a fascinating leaked document (pdf) obtained by EDRI, it seems that even the G8 countries have accepted that ACTA is probably dead -- and have started working on a successor.
On
Techdirt.
As a way of fighting unauthorized sharing of digital files, DRM is
particularly stupid. It not only doesn't work -- DRM is always broken,
and DRM-less versions quickly produced -- it also makes the official
versions less valuable than the pirated ones, since they are less
convenient to use in multiple ways. As a result, DRM actually makes
piracy more attractive, which is probably why most of the music industry
eventually decided to drop it.
On
Techdirt.
Something that's proving popular with politicians running out of
ideas for tackling unauthorized sharing of copyright materials online is
to make ISPs and Web sites responsible for the actions of their users
-- even though nobody would think of doing the same for telephone
companies. SOPA was one of the best-known examples of this approach,
and now it looks like Russia wants to join the club:
On
Techdirt.
At the end of a morning of discussions about ACTA organized by the Socialists and Democrats in the European Parliament, the Rapporteur for ACTA, David Martin, has recommended that the European Parliament should reject the treaty, saying:
On
Techdirt.
What an extraordinary ride ACTA is proving.
When I first started this series of ACTA
Updates back in February, I didn't hold out much hope that we would be
able to stop it simply grinding through the European approval process.
But over the last two months I've detailed some amazing events that have
had a huge impact on ACTA's chances of being ratified. And yesterday, those amazing events culminated in the following statement from the European Parliament's rapporteur for ACTA:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
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.
The Boycott Elsevier
movement discussed here on Techdirt several times was born of a
frustration at the high prices of academic journals. But another area
arguably afflicted even more is that of textbooks for higher education:
On
Techdirt.
Earlier this week I wrote
about the first company based on open source to reach a turnover of one
billion dollars. But of course, there are lots of multi-billion dollar
turnover companies that are based on open source - Google, Facebook,
Twitter etc. - it's just that they don't make money off it directly.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
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