OK, IANAL. However, I do recall case law (IIRC in Texas) to the effect that copyrighted works which are incorporated by reference into the law lose protection. How this would play in other countries is anyone’s guess, of course, but might be worth investigation.

E.g., when one begins to navigate the incredible number of ISO, IEC, and JTC 1 documents necessary to evaluate and make informed comments on draft standards, the cost of obtaining all needed documents can work as an absolute bar to participation by those without lots of shekels.

For example, ISO/IEC:29500-2008 incorporates by reference a host of other standards and even the JTC 1 glossary of terms used in standards development work has a hefty price tag on it.

I am constantly finding that the custom of standards development organizations deriving substantial revenue from their published documents blocks me from performing needed research to inform myself in evaluating standards.

Where this becomes outrageous is when governments adopt such standards as national technical regulations or as technical specifications for procurement. The documents incorporated by reference into such standards are effectively transformed into law, but their availability is limited as a practical matter to large companies and government agencies who can pay the bills for their own access to such information.

Such standards also pose yet another barrier to small companies implementing such standards. Patents and royalty requirements are not the only intellectual property/financial barrier to implementation of many standards. SDO claims of copyright to standards are another.

I have pondered this issue over the years and, reluctantly, I see no solution other than requiring that standards being considered or adopted as government technical regulations or technical specifications must be freely available and without charge, including all standards and other documents incorporated by reference.

I leave it to others to decide whether governments should reimburse SDOs for the lost revenue. But at least in the U.S. federal scheme of things, government laws, regulations, and other government documents must be available to the public at no higher cost than the cost of reproduction (and agencies must waive even copying fees when doing so is in the public interest) and cannot be subject to copyright.

I believe that any serious standards reform must address all costs of standards development participation and implementation. I.e., the manner in which SDOs derive their revenues must be tweaked.

That would have been my assumption a few years ago, but looking at some of the odd patents the USPTO has been handing out lately, I worry a lot about that being a thorn in the side of FLOSS. You don’t think if Microsoft could get away with patenting the idea of something like the X server they would, and then license it to Apple and try to destroy Linux and BSD that way?

Let me put it this way; there is a US patent on the peanut butter sandwich. That’s at least 50 years old, if not older (I’d bet on older).

I wish I knew why they are doing it. I hope it’s an attempt to push some resources the way of the ‘next generation’; a kind of counterweight to the copyrights and patents which are an attempt to make the ‘old guard’ rich at the expense of the youngsters.

So not everyone’s greedy.

Will it facilitate progress ? Who knows.

If someone were to take away X, or even to try and pervert it.

“Someone” tried. Two times. First X Consorcium changed license for X11R6.4 – and free software community rejected it. Later XFree86 changed license and X.Org was born.

via bad includes or retarded patents or what have you

Bad includes are not a problem (see above), retarded patents are always a problem – standarts don’t really help (see Microsoft’s MP3 woes).

Since any pile of shit can be declared “an international standard” if you have enough money (see OOXML) I see absolutely no reason to spend time and money for useless certificates (that’s what ISO standards became).

The purpose of patents isn’t to destroy.

That’s how they work in practice. For one case where patent helped something (may be RCU can be declared as such a case) you have ten or hundred cases where patents were used for extortion.

Something along the lines of “You have a patent, I have a patent, let’s get together and make a product we can sell”. Like “You’re a girl, I’m a boy, let’s get together and make a family we can raise.”

This is perversion of the original idea. Original idea for patent was to make it profitable to disclose trade secrets: you can publish the description of creation process for your crown jewels – and no one will be able to use for twenty years without your permission.

And software already has such protection: copyrights.

As for “Open Standards”…

Free software community MUST strive to achieve and improve interoperability. That’s noble goal. Formal certificates for standards are NOT A GOAL. It does not improve anything by itself, it can be bought without helping interoperability – in short: it’s mostly useless waste of time and money.

Some good interoperability work happens in ISO and even ECMA: ISO C++ 2009, ECMAScript 4, etc. We should help these folks if we can. But in general standards are just paper (and not even that today), nothing more.

The purpose of patents isn’t to destroy; it’s to accelerate commercialisation. Something along the lines of “You have a patent, I have a patent, let’s get together and make a product we can sell”. Like “You’re a girl, I’m a boy, let’s get together and make a family we can raise.”

A collaborative force, if you will.

It’s noticeable that the commercial Linux distributors … Novell and RedHat … are no longer distributing MP3 playing software with their ‘consumer’ Fedora and OpenSuSE offerings. I imagine that’s because ‘consumer’ distribution doesn’t generate any revenue to pay the MP3 patent licence holder (Fraunhofer Research or Alcatel-Lucent, depending on which version of history you believe).

Can I get a one-user patent licence from the rights owner for a sensible ‘domestic use’ price ? Anything under a dollar would be reasonable. Where do I send the check ?

And what’s the consequence of not being able to ? If MP3 is an inaccessible standard for me, it will force me to find an alternative.

Much open-source software has its roots in US universities; ‘BSD Unix’ is Berkeley, i.e. University of California; and in the present day it’s Massachussetts Institute of Technology who are determined to bring us the One Laptop Per Child.

It turns out that the Regents of the University of California dedicate their work to the citizens and businesses of California; i.e. the BSD licence is an attempt to return value to the taxpayer who funded the development.

Much proprietary software has its roots in US corporations; ATT Unix and Microsoft Windows being prime examples.

And the US Government cannot hold copyrights; a copyright is a private right, the government is public; so if they publish software (as NASA does from time to time) then it will be open source.

US corporations vary in their attitude to open source. ATT (of Unix fame) now deploys a lot of Linux in their telco and broadband operations. Apple OSX is a proprietary layer on top of BSD Unix; Apple HQ is just across the bridge from Berkeley in California.

So the story will run and run. The interesting part is how the new growth areas in the world … Brazil, Russia, India, China … will make their mark on it.

The Microsoft-Windows-and-Microsoft-Office ‘trip’ has been a wild excursion in the direction of ‘software you do not have the source for’, lasting for about 20 years. I think things are returning to an equilibrium now.

Commercial squabbles, scientific progress, or some of both ?

Nice piece. On the subject of civic standards I think I should point out (from South Africa) that the reason why the SA mandate was so strong – in Geneva and elsewhere – is that our national body subcommittee is made up of primarily of non-corporates. And we voted No this morning.

Sure IBM and MS are there (but as wholly owned foreign subsidiaries we are thinking of downgrading you all). But mostly we are south african small companies, ngo’s and government (which does its best to represent the interests of all our citizens). We are far from perfect but we can say that our people spoke this morning when we rejected this ridiculous proposal of a standard.

I really like the cat metaphor. You are right on the button.

Steve Biko once said “I write what I like”. And that includes schema and computer programs. If the US folk don’t like it then thats just tough shit. Its not technology, its grammar. And we’re talking.

Regards
Bob

It is laughable to even talk about the format as a serieus format.

What will it change? It took 10 years for Microsoft to implement CSS1 correctly. MS IE still intentionally violates HTTP (the fact is even written in the hall of shame) but it does not change anything: MS IE is still #1 browser.

Microsoft’s position is simple: Standards compliance? What is it? That’s for dweebs. We define the standards, everyone else follow. Technical decisions should not be hampered by standards compliance, that’s purely marketing problem: marketing should make sure that we have all needed “standards compliant” stamps.

POSIX, TCP/IP, HTTP, Java… Everything Microsoft touches Microsoft perverses. There are only one solution to this problem: MICROSOFT MUST DIE. Some products can be salvaged, Microsoft does some good too, but MICROSOFT MUST DIE. Till that happens standards will not matter much…

Gopal

Joel has correctly identified the problem with many Internet standards, in the above, namely that we lack good enough tests for compliance. We often have to take the word of Microsoft at al that their software “supports” a standard.

I hope some of these Open Standards Activists can help by producing test suites.

One topical example is OOXML. If the DIS29500 standard is accepted, I dream of a a huge test suite, written by volunteers each taking a page of the standard in a similar way to Rob’s work here. They would write test cases using the most extreme XML possible that follows every dot and comma of the standard. Then we can really see whos software supports OOXML accurately, and it might not be Microsoft’s – giafly.

Back when I was doing standards work with JEDEC [1] we had a saying that the real power in the committee rested with those who did the work. Truer words never spoken.

There were big companies and small ones, but regardless of the fact that membership officially resided with the company you knew that the real power was with the people who came with armloads of hard work product. Over the years we would lose some of those and gain others, and the power in the committee shifted visibly as a result.

The moral? If you want to influence a real technical committee [2], be prepared to sweat. Nobody wants to hear about “should” or “ought to.” Bring simulations, bring reference implementations, bring cross-reference tables, bring indexed lists of self-contradictions in the drafts, bring mathematical proofs that the fool thing only works by violating known theorems. Whatever you do, bring detailed proposals for draft changes in professional “from/to” form.

A whine is heard for a moment, but sweat stains end up in the final work.

[1] For those who care, IBM was always a wonderful member: big contributor, never anything but courteous and respectful. Take a bow, Rob, you’ve got good people on the team.
[2] Recent events are an aberration. This kind of power play isn’t sustainable for reasons we’ve already seen.

Good question, but very hard to answer. For example: what is “standard video format” in FOSS world? Everyone have different opinions, but the thing which a lot of people perceive as “today’s standard” is Matroska file with H.264 video, Vorbis audio and VSFilter or SSA subtitles. One out of four is ISO standard, while two more have at least specifications where VSFilter only have documentation in a form of reference implementation and specifications for SSA can not be found on original site anymore! Does it mean you’ll have trouble trying to play such “standard” file? Not at all: VLC, MPlayer or XINE will play such a file nicely. Heck: cheap DVD-players can play them! And if we’ll try to make ISO standard out of all that we’ll spend a lot of money and time… what for? What exactly we’ll get in exchange?

Note: not all FOSS people with perceive this set as “a standard”: many don’t care about subtitles, for example. Others will prefer AC3 audio and so on.

It’s hard to decide what to standardize on because by the time ISO will give stamp of the approval to the format people will actually use something else… Just released Dirac, for example. Who knows?

The open multimedia standards will gain ground eventually IMHO due to peoples disgust with DRM.

Its really only in ODF vs MSXML that this matters – due to the awarding of government contracts for state/school/uni desktop setups.

In my work as a translator, I receive documents from various companies every day, and a unified doc standard would certaily help.

I’ve been on linux/open office for years now, and there are problems of interoperability with MS Word, although noone ever batters an eyelid (as MS Word versions are also internally incompatible).

GO ODF! :D

You get pedigree cats. Go to any cat show, find a breeder, put your money down, go home with a cat and a birth certificate. And a warning not to reproduce without permission; if you want to allow the cat to reproduce, go back to the breeder, put more money down, and a suitable mate will be found.

You also get stray cats. Just wander about the lanes until you find a sign saying ‘kittens’. Go in the door, one jumps on you, if you can give it a good home you can take it. No money needed. And it will reproduce, if at all possible, whether or not it gets permission.

Free software won’t die. It will thrive inside corporations, it will thrive inside academia, and it will thrive inside private homes.

It may have trouble getting from one to the other, and it may have trouble being deployed in commercial products of corporations.

But we have an Internet now. And the flame cannot be extinguished.

The cat is out of the bag, and it will not be recaptured.

Go Symphony. Make Lotus SmartSuite obsolete. Bring on the next generation !