UK Gov't Says Open Standards Must Be Royalty Free 91
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."'"
FYI: JBIG1 now patent free outside the US (Score:4, Interesting)
http://freshmeat.net/projects/jbigkit/announcements/583-jbig1-now-patent-free-outside-the-united-states
GDI printers, etc... include this tech. I.E. printers from HP, Konica, Xerox, Oki, Samsung, Lexmark, and Kyocera.
Re:Patents (Score:4, Interesting)
Hear hear. The entire dependency tree of any standard should, in addition to the standard itself, be completely 'open' according to this new insightful definition. If that's not the case, then the standard should not be regarded as 'open' whatsoever.
UK Govt should take heed of this and update their definitions accordingly (if necessary).
Re:Clue bat achievement unlocked (Score:5, Interesting)
But there are no implementations that would not run afoul of MS' patents at this time. There's where the argument will fall flat on it's face- the definition is explicit and MS would have to divuge their secrets and make them available on a permanant royalty free basis. MPEG-LA should take note: they're not an open standard per that correct definition by the UK government either- and WebM IS. They're going to need to come up with an answer that meets this criteria because the saber rattling they're doing against VP8/WebM isn't going to go very far and they've now got a problem because they're facing TWO FOSS codecs that meet the UK criteria of Open Standards.
Re:Clue bat achievement unlocked (Score:2, Interesting)
You're being a bit naive there. OOXML, as originally submitted for fast tracking, was just the XMLized version of the binary formats. As such, it was a de-facto standard in another skin. It was the ISO process itself that changed that submitted standard so that Office was no longer compatible with it.
So, it's a bit of a farce to say that MS did not fast-track a de-facto standard. They did, but the standard body itself altered it.