UK Gov't Says Open Standards Must Be Royalty Free

An anonymous reader writes "The H reports on an interesting development in the United Kingdom's procurement policy. From the article: 'New procurement guidance from the UK government has defined open standards as having "intellectual property made irrevocably available on a royalty free basis." The document, which has been published by the Cabinet Office, applies to all government departments and says that, when purchasing software, technology infrastructure, security or other goods and services, departments should "wherever possible deploy open standards."'"

Patents

[TheRaven64]

Note that the UK does not regard software patents as valid (although the last definitive statement on this was made by the previous government, so this one may reverse it), which means that things like H.264 still count as open standards under this definition, because the relevant 'intellectual property' is not regarded as property in the UK.

Re:Glad they focussed on standards

[oliverthered]

Government defines “open standards” as standards which:
  result from and are maintained through an open, independent process;
  are approved by a recognised specification or standardisation organisation, for
example W3C or ISO or equivalent. (N.B. The specification/standardisation
must be compliant with Regulation 9 of the Public Contracts Regulations 2006.
This regulation makes it clear that technical specifications/standards cannot
simply be national standards but must also include/recognise European
standards);
  are thoroughly documented and publicly available at zero or low cost;
  have intellectual property made irrevocably available on a royalty free basis;
andAction Note 3/11 31 January 2011
  as a whole can be implemented and shared under different development
approaches and on a number of platforms.

Re:Clue bat achievement unlocked

[Alain Williams]

Actually there are no implementations of OOXML/DIS 29500. The MS .docx format certainly does not conform - although MS tries to give the impression that it does.

Open standards means using Microsoft Office

[flemmingbjerke]

In Denmark, we have had a similar document passed in the parliament in 2007. It entailed strong disputes over whether Microsoft's ISO-approved document standard (OOXML) was open or not. The outcome still not clear. But, the danger is that Microsoft's OOXML actually becomes a mandatory standard. This could easily become the outcome of the British government's Procurement Policy Note. Bullet 4 says:

"Government assets should be interoperable and open for re-use in order to maximise return on investment, avoid technological lock-in, reduce operational risk in ICT projects and provide responsive services for citizens and businesses."

By upgrading to Microsoft's OOXML (docx, xlsx, etc), it becomes the most widespread document format. This implies that government offices must use Microsoft Word, Excel, etc. in order to:
- ensure interoperability
- maximise return (avoiding conversion cost with e.g. ODF)
- avoid lock-in to other formats (e.g. to ODF),
- reduce operational risk (i.e. the Microsoft security package connectied with the office package)
- provide responsive services (citizen and business use Microsoft's document formats).

(I don't say these arguments are true, but that they tend to be accepted politically.)

Making open standards mandatory may imply that Microsoft Office becomes mandatory!

Re:They get it at least.

[TheRaven64]

Huh? OpenOffice is not a standard of any kind, it's an application. ODF is a standard, which is controlled by an independent body and can be implemented without paying a royalty, so it meets this definition and any office suite that supports ODF can be used in accordance with this directive. So does MS OOXML, but, unfortunately, MS Office fails the OOXML compliance test suite, so it can't be used as an OOXML editor.

autoSpaceLikeWord95

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed.

To understand why, look at the following instructive example
from the original OOXML spec (not the ISO DIS 29500 but the really-used Microsoft format):

2.15.3.6 autoSpaceLikeWord95 (Emulate Word 95 Full-Width Character Spacing)

This element specifies that applications shall emulate the behavior of a previously existing word processing
application (Microsoft Word 95) when determining the spacing between full-width East Asian characters in a
document's content.
[Guidance: To faithfully replicate this behavior, applications must imitate the behavior of that application, which
involves many possible behaviors and cannot be faithfully placed into narrative for this Office Open XML
Standard. If applications wish to match this behavior, they must utilize and duplicate the output of those
applications. It is recommended that applications not intentionally replicate this behavior as it was deprecated
due to issues with its output, and is maintained only for compatibility with existing documents from that
application. end guidance]

Re:Clue bat achievement unlocked

[Alain Williams]

Yes - MS bought ISO votes in many countries so that OOXML could be fast tracked.

Fast tracking is reserved for what are usually de-facto standards with multiple implementations. OOXML is not implemented by anything, anywhere; the ISO vote was a fraud.