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Friday, January 20, 2006

Open Standards Hit the Airwaves

Denmark's Hard Disk radio program will air an interview by Anders Høeg Nissen with me and John Gotze, a member of the Open ePolicy Group, this weekend. We will talking about open standards, ODF and the openization of ICT ecosystems.

The program is already available online here. The show is mainly in Danish, but my comments are in english.

Also available is fhe full audio for last week's Open Standards Conference in Copenhagen. My presentation on the Roadmap for Open ICT Ecosystems starts about 5 minutes into the program. Have a listen here!

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

On the dumping of a whale in front of the Japanese embassy in Berlin, there is hardly any reporting of it in the main Japanese news on the internet.

I find that very strange....

Anonymous said...

There was a lot of discussion about what an "open standard" is.
Some Danish organisations have agreed on this definition (in Danish). There's an official English translation here.

Jeff said...

I like the elaboration definition of "open standard" definition offered by these groups in Denmark. One question:

Must the specs and documentation be available for free, or can there be a price attached?

Anonymous said...

That was a topic of discussion. We believe that it is not relevant to the openness of the standard. All the definition says about this is:
"The documentation must be published in an ordinary way."

Which probably is a bad translation. Another would be "publish as is normally understood by 'published'".

That means that you could charge a fee for a copy of the documentation, but it would be subject only to copyright (not to patents). Others would be free to write their own technical documentation of how to implement the standard. Libraries would be able to provide free access to the standard.


Of course, the ideal would be that the official documentation was freely distributable, but that would rule out several ISO standards which are otherwise open. (such as ISO 3166-1).
We also felt that convincing organisations like ISO to make their standards freely available on the Internet was orthogonal to the issue of ensuring open standards in public infrastrucure.

Anonymous said...

That was a topic of discussion. We believe that it is not relevant to the openness of the standard. All the definition says about this is:
"The documentation must be published in an ordinary way."

Which probably is a bad translation. Another would be "publish as is normally understood by 'published'".

That means that you could charge a fee for a copy of the documentation, but it would be subject only to copyright (not to patents). Others would be free to write their own technical documentation of how to implement the standard. Libraries would be able to provide free access to the standard.


Of course, the ideal would be that the official documentation was freely distributable, but that would rule out several ISO standards which are otherwise open. (such as ISO 3166-1).
We also felt that convincing organisations like ISO to make their standards freely available on the Internet was orthogonal to the issue of ensuring open standards in public infrastrucure.