In the session on interoperability and open standards, Barbara Held from the European Commission's IDA (Interchange of Data between Administrations) Unit announced their definition of Open Standards, which require the royalty-free licensing of any applicable patents, and prohibit any restrictions on re-use of open standards. While a representative from COMPTIA in the audience heavily criticised this new definition, speakers Doug Heintzmann from IBM and Phil Zamani from Novell said their organisations were in support of the new definition of open standards.
Among other speakers, Christian Hardy from the French ministry of finance presented the large migration of over 100,000 desktops to OpenOffice, the free software alternative to Microsoft Office, across the national French Administration. Rolf Theodor Schuster, CIO at the German Foreign Ministry presented a live demonstration of the fully open source desktop and server system that secures the global German embassy network.
Additionally, the vice-mayor of The Hague, and representatives from government authorities in Vienna, London, Haarlem and the Union of Italian Provinces described their open source experiences and future plans.
The event was organised by MERIT, University of Maastricht under the FLOSSPOLS project supported by the 6th Framework IST / e-government Programme European Commission, the Dutch Ministries of Economic Affairs and of the Interior, and the Dutch Government's OSOSS Programme.
The European Commission's definition of open standards is part of the final version 1.0 of the European Interoperability Framework which also encourages the favourable consideration of open source software. The Framework has a definition that is worth quoting in full:
Use of Open Standards
To attain interoperability in the context of pan-European eGovernment services, guidance needs to focus on open standards. The following are the minimal characteristics that a specification and its attendant documents must have in order to be considered an open standard:
- The standard is adopted and will be maintained by a not-for-profit organisation, and its ongoing development occurs on the basis of an open decision-making procedure available to all interested parties (consensus or majority decision etc.).
- The standard has been published and the standard specification document is available either freely or at a nominal charge. It must be permissible to all to copy, distribute and use it for no fee or at a nominal fee.
- The intellectual property ? i.e. patents possibly present ? of (parts of) the standard is made irrevocably available on a royalty-free basis.
- There are no constraints on the re-use of the standard.
The EC document goes on to suggest a strong link between open source and open standards. In particular, it says that "OSS products are, by their nature, publicly available specifications, and the availability of their source code promotes open, democratic debate around the specifications, making them both more robust and interoperable. As such, OSS corresponds to the objectives of this Framework and should be assessed and considered favourably alongside proprietary alternatives."
More information and the conference programme is available at the conference website. Presentations from the sessions should be available early next week.
Autor: Rishab Aiyer Ghosh
Quelle: NewsForge, 19.11.2004
