Adopting Open Standards

This is something I have been crying hoarse for many many years.Now the Britishers (among many others!!) seems to have heard my voice ;-) Do read the full article from the BBC site article.  Read on here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20178175


Wish there were similar initiatives - if not in the Government, at least in our organisations. It confounds me why we can't put this in our RFCs and Procurement processes ?? Again - needs the right people at the right places who understand technology and its implications!!

Extract from the site :

Government IT projects: UK adopts open technology standards

"For too long, government IT has been too expensive, over-specified and run in contract structures that encourage complexity, duplication and fragmented user services," said Cabinet Office Minister Francis Maude in a speech announcing the strategy.

The standards the government wanted to adopt would favour smaller, innovative tech firms and would demand compliance with open data formats and protocols from every IT supplier, he said.

In the technology world, open standards stand in opposition to proprietary formats. As their name implies they let everyone that wants to look at how a program is built or data is formatted.
This openness helps to flush out bugs in software and makes it easier for data to travel and be re-used as programmers can easily see how it is structured.

Some more info on Open Standards

Open Standards on Wikipedia found here

A quick primer on the Open Standards principles from here :-

Availability
Open Standards are available for all to read and implement.

Maximize End-User Choice
Open Standards create a fair, competitive market for implementations of the standard. They do not lock the customer in to a particular vendor or group.

No Royalty
Open Standards are free for all to implement, with no royalty or fee. Certification of compliance by the standards organization may involve a fee.

No Discrimination
Open Standards and the organizations that administer them do not favor one implementor over another for any reason other than the technical standards compliance of a vendor's implementation. Certification organizations must provide a path for low and zero-cost implementations to be validated, but may also provide enhanced certification services.

Extension or Subset
Implementations of Open Standards may be extended, or offered in subset form. However, certification organizations may decline to certify subset implementations, and may place requirements upon extensions (see Predatory Practices).

Predatory Practices
Open Standards may employ license terms that protect against subversion of the standard by embrace-and-extend tactics. The licenses attached to the standard may require the publication of reference information for extensions, and a license for all others to create, distribute, and sell software that is compatible with the extensions. An Open Standard may not othewise prohibit extensions