On 14/04/12 16:13, Norman Silverstone wrote:
< big snip>
Update 2012:
Proprietary lobby triumphs in first open standards showdown
http://www.computerweekly.com/blogs/public-sector/2012/04/proprietary-lobby-triumphs-in.html
--
Is this not yet another example of the ineptness of the present
Government and its subservience to big business.
Norman
not really, the government set up the consultations announced them, some
people turned up from the open standards community, lots of people
turned up from the proprietary companies (including people being flown
in from America to attend)
http://consultation.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/openstandards/events/
Round tables 3 and 2 have not happened yet, please do try to turn up if
you can (I know it is hard if you don't have someone paying you to go).
The outcome of all this won't be decided on a show of hands from the
round table meetings, they just want feedback from those. The very best
thing you can do whilst sat in the comfort of your own home or office is
to fill out the consultation form:
http://consultation.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/openstandards/question1/
http://consultation.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/openstandards/question2/
http://consultation.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/openstandards/question3/
you can see on this the links to see what others have said. All
responses to the consultation will be published (I will do a freedom of
information request for the ones that are not published on the website
when the consultation closes) and you can see that the general consensus
of the published written responses is decidedly in favour of real open
standards.
If you are confused about what the fuss is all about, it is whether
"open standard" should be allowed to contain patents that are licensed
under FRAND terms. FRAND stands for the excellent sounding "Fair
Reasonable and Non Discriminatory" but this is a big problem. The theory
is that you can have a patent in an open standard that requires a modest
payment to the license holder. So for example, lets take a fictional
video format called MPVC which is just wonderful at compressing pictures
of lots of people, but it bears a royalty of £0.01 per user. Sounds
fine, it doesn't cost much, people can make set-top boxes and pay their
penny, parliament streams in MPVC and mandates the use of MPVC for
various other things. Now if someone wants to write an MPVC decoder and
distribute it as Free Software under the GPL they can't because they
can't count the users and make the payment to the license holder. This
is a real means for proprietary companies to block competition from Free
Software.
There is more about this here and elsewhere on the web:
http://opensource.com/law/11/1/open-standards-and-royalty-problem
Go fill out that consultation. I did, you can read my responses on the
website.
Alan.
--
The Open Learning Centre is rebranding, find out about our new name and look at
http://libertus.co.uk
--
ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com
https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
