Encourage UK PLC to use Open Standards
Do you remember that total Jerk Dennis Byron? The chap who thought that Digistan was some sort of terrorist organisation? Well here’s a rather nicely ironic way to shove his ignorant and frankly stupid views in that familiar place where “the sun doesn’t shine”.
A fellow colleague on the blogosphere, Russell Ossendryver, sent me an email linking to a recent on-line petition instigated by John McCreesh (of OpenOffice.org) on 10 Downing Street’s petition engine.
Basically it calls for the UK Government to:
(1) Procure only information technology that implements free and open standards;
(2) Deliver e-government services based exclusively on free and open standards;
(3) Use only free and open digital standards in their own activities.
as adopted and proclaimed by the founders of the Digital Standards Organization in The Hague on 21 May 2008.
That sounds like a fine idea to me! It would save the country literally hundreds of millions of pounds just for starters.
There are some particularly interesting names already on the list of signatories:
Mark Taylor (Open Source Consortium), Chris Puttick (CIO for Oxford Archaeology), Glyn Moody (Journalist and Open Source Commentator: http://opendotdotdot.blogspot.com), and Ian Lynch (of INGOTS fame).
I’ve signed it. If you think that Open Standards are important (and you SHOULD if you are reading this!) then what are you waiting for? Click here and register your opinion.
What a difference a single letter makes…
I have just read this article on the Register and it makes me proud to be British!
A patent for the handling of gratuities in card payments has been revoked by the UK Intellectual Property Office (IPO) for being a business method implemented by a computer program. The decision follows recently-revised guidance on patentability.
One of the inventors told OUT-LAW today that his company spent more than £100,000 trying to enforce and defend the patent before passing the rights to another company, which he described as a “patent troll”. He believes that company will appeal this month’s ruling.
If you read the full story, there isn’t anything remotely “patentable” about this idea at all.
Their patent described a process of generating and handling an electronic online authorisation and uploading request relating to a payment transaction. The customer would be offered the chance to add a gratuity and a request for authorisation of the total would be constructed. A request would then be made over a telecoms network and a receipt generated for the customer.
Yes. That’s it. It’s an idea about how to charge for a tip and the main bill at the same time! Pretty new and innovative huh? Good grief… How on earth does anyone think this is patentable?
Patents are to protect INVENTIONS. That is new things, things that haven’t been thought of before or that are not just evolution to the status quo.
Over here we have some tests that a patent application must pass.
A landmark ruling in 2006 in the cases of Aerotel and Macrossan changed the way the UK-IPO assesses whether inventions are patentable. A new four-step test was introduced for the assessment of patentability:
- Properly construe the claim;
- Identify the actual contribution;
- Ask whether it falls solely within the excluded matter;
- Check whether the contribution is actually technical in nature.
Step 3 caused the patent to fall. The patent can cut fraud and enable gratuities to be paid by card at the same time as the principal sum; but the Hearing Officer wrote: “while they may be advantages of the invention, they are not achieved by technical means… They are achieved by changing the business process – i.e. changing the sequence of steps – in which the terminals are used. The claim is to how a business uses a known system.”
“The contribution falls squarely within the business method exclusion. It also falls within the computer program exclusion given its implementation by means of a computer program,” he concluded.
Ho hum. That sounds quite sensible to me. Although – as the title of this piece suggests – if you replace the K in UK with an S. Guess what? Yep. It’s protected by patent law.
There are some cracking comments on this post too. Well worth a read if you find the whole US/EU patent differences interesting. Especially when it comes to software and computing.
Why does the UK Government not “grok” open source?
Here’s an interesting post from Matt Assay – blogger extrodinnaire – it seems the US public offices are starting to grok what Open Source is all about. Apart from a few stalwarts in our opposition parties it seems as though Tony B’s legacy lives on…
- 71% of all US federal respondents believe that their agency can benefit from open source (with 88% within the intelligence community holding this view because of advanced security within open source);
- 55% of all respondents have been or are involved in an open-source implementation (and 90% of those that have implemented believe they have benefited from it – talk about killer approval ratings – which may be why 29% of those who have not implemented are planning to do so in the next 12 months…)
Nice one Matt.
 It’s a very good time to be in open source.
My sentiments exactly…
OpenOffice.org Market Share Numbers (What’s up in the UK?)
I found this link via a post on the OO.o marketing mailing list this morning.
The figures that follow are probably nowhere near complete either. We know that in Holland they are moving the whole of the Amsterdam administration over to Open Source and I’m certain that there will be many more companies and public bodies that either: haven’t seen this list and know that they can contribute, or are simply not allowed to. If you know of any one using OO.o in their business, public agency or wherever else, encourage them to get it on this list!
There are some pretty amazing numbers on there, showing some very large installations of OpenOffce.org. But what really grabbed my attention was some of the European statistics:
- Austria: 18,000 seats.
- Belgium: 4,000 seats.
- Finland: 10,000 seats.
- France: 490,750 seats!
- Germany: 25,900 seats.
- Spain: 388,000 seats!
- UK: 5000 seats (One entry only, for Bristol City Council)
Now something is surely very wrong here… France and Spain are using, close to, a million (878,750) copies of Open Office. That’s got to be several hundred million pounds worth of license fees they aren’t paying to M$. And not just once, either. That’ll be every three years or so I guess.
If our government wasn’t so in bed with M$ we could probably have built a couple of new hospitals, or a dozen or so new schools with that kind of money… Jeeez, this makes me really angry.
What a WOFM. (Waste Of [insert famous anglo-saxon adjective here] Money)
Open Source Solution for the UK National Archive?
This old story gets even more ridiculous. The fact that the head of the national library is a co-chair and obvious supporter of M$’s OOXML specification, led our National Archive to spend yet more money with Microsoft for a solution that will actually NOT fix the problem. More documents will be stored in a, as yet non-standardised and closed, document format. That will, eventually require us to spend even more money yet again just to get access to old electronic documents.
It seems our antipodean partners have come up with a solution: It’s called Xena. And it’s Open Source and uses the GPL.
Xena is free and open source software developed by the National Archives of Australia to aid in the long term preservation of digital records. Xena is an acronym meaning ‘Xml Electronic Normalising for Archives’.
Xena software aids digital preservation by performing two important tasks:
- Detecting the file formats of digital objects
- Converting digital objects into open formats for preservation
Now this sounds like a very decent solution. Read that last bullet once more:
- Converting digital objects into open formats for preservation
Adam Farquhar and the National Archive of Great Britain please take note…
Wake Up and Smell the Coffee: Open Source Advocacy
“Ignoring open source is costing us [the UK] dear”
The headline is from the Guardian on-line this morning. In a piece written by Victor Keegan, he explains how we [UK PLC] are suffering from our pathetic use of Open Source, especially in terms of leadership from our Government.
You would have thought that a Labour government, struggling to marry the success of market forces with the socialist endowment of its founding fathers, would have latched on to this new cooperativism which brings people together for a common purpose with a burning zeal. In fact, its wanton neglect could damage our economic prospects.
Well yes, apart from the fact that our previous leader was a bosom buddy of Bill Gates (And there are lots more. Just Google for their two names…) and so our Government was highly unlikely to shun M$’s approaches.
The depth of its neglect was made plain by speakers at a seminar last week hosted by Westminster eForum, which tries to make parliament aware of IT issues. It turns out, in contrast to what other governments are doing, that most departments – including Health, Work and the Foreign Office – are so risk-averse they have virtually no open source in their IT infrastructures. The Treasury runs less than 1% of its operations with open source. The Conservatives, who rightly believe Labour is vulnerable in this area, claim that nearly £700m could be saved by switching to open source. This is disputed by others who point to the high initial cost of switching from an embedded system and retraining everyone. But in the long run, low maintenance costs plus the absence of licence fees and upgrade charges must give open source the edge and, even if it didn’t, there is still a strong case for encouraging it because a workforce skilled in open source would be well placed to exploit the enormous opportunities opening up for the future.
See this piece from Glyn Moody for a transcript of the presentation he gave at the eForum meeting. (According to one commenter he received a standing ovation!). If the Government would actually take a look at the big Enterprises, they would discover that Open Source is very much in-place and gaining ground at a rapid pace. Why would Yahoo just spend $350m on an Open Source business with revenues of less than $10m? Why is Redhat so successful? Why are there more and more Open Source companies springing up? Why do IBM, Novell, Sun Microsystems, and even Oracle to a lesser extent, get Open Source? Because their customers (Big Corporates) demand it.
Schools are not much better, a double tragedy because they not only don’t benefit from savings but also lose the opportunity to train children in the skills of the future.
And this is nothing short of scandalous… As I have mentioned before, our schools have been completely sold out to M$. They are locked in to very expensive subscription licensing deals that mean they (we via our TAX) end up paying for software that they can’t use. And there are heinous penalties for cancelling contracts. In terms of the skills gap and the value of Open Source in “learning” I agree and would emphasise this point much, much more. This is the nature of Open Source, one of the Four Freedoms is the ability to investigate and learn. You can’t do that with M$, and other proprietary, products.
There is one other major issue that Victor failed to mention in his otherwise interesting article. Open Standards.
We have seen recently how Microsoft has bullied, bribed and threatened their way through the ISO to try and get a proprietary document specification, the sole aim of which is to continue to lock-in customers and make your data belong to M$ for the indefinite future, passed as an International Open Standard. And now we learn that they don’t intend to implement it themselves anyway!
Open Source software is built on true Open Standards and as such, your data belongs to you and you will always be able to get access to it because the formats are “open” and publicly available. Try opening an old MS Office document with your shiny, new and very expensive Office suite. Oooops. Guess what; you can’t. You have to go back to M$, cap-in-hand, and buy more of their software just to access your own materials. Just as the National Archive has recently discovered.
And finally, on Monday of this week, the EU has upheld the anti-trust decision made several years ago. Microsoft are a bunch of crooks and have been caught. They use their dominant position to smother and throttle competition. Nice. And don’t forget the ridiculous goings on in the BBC where their new iPlayer is Microsoft only (good for the licence payer, that one!) and they are employing ex, Microsoft people to promote and develop the platform.
Please, please, please. Everyone wake up and smell the coffee before it’s too late.
