What is the problem? Is this actually a “problem” or a matter of differing goals? What is the lesson? Is it possible that the real problem is the market distortion that could occur when advocates from one side promote government intervention to their advantage (and to the disadvantage of other development and distribution models)? Government policy makers contemplating to alter rules affecting standards setting must exercise extreme caution.
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Reflections on the nature of the problem for the economy caused by the potential tension between standards with IPRs and OSS

This article is co-authored by Anne Layne-Farrar and Daniel Garcia-Swartz (bio Here)

As fellow commenter Stacy Baird notes in his contribution to today’s discussion, all open source licenses are not created equal – hard line licenses, like the GPL, place more restrictions on users and thus create tensions with RAND/FRAND that don’t otherwise exist. Indeed, open source and IPR protected software frequently coexist quite peaceably.
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Both open standards and open source are related but evolving. Given recent events, we could even say that Open source is maturing. Today, rather than considering the dichotomy between open source and proprietary software; we are now evaluating specific open source licenses, how they work with various business goals and how they will play out in the future.

In many ways, our forum topic this month addresses that issue. Stacy says: The answer lies in licenses: not the patent licenses, but certain open source software licenses. James says: Demands for royalties are becoming rarer, in our own domain.
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In February, 24 of the world’s largest telecoms announced the formation of an alliance – the Wholesale Applications Community – to provided a unified and open platform for the rapidly growing – both in magnitude and fragmentation – mobile application market. The stated aim to enable developers to “deploy a single application across multiple devices (through the use of standard technologies) and across multiple operators”, which will lower costs and improve both the quality and quantity of mobile applications available to consumers.

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SYNOPSIS

There is a curious paradox which we are seeing increasingly. We see closed systems built on open standards and open source. I illustrate the phenomenon giving three instances below (Apple and Facetime, Open source and the Cloud and SPDY – the proposed new protocol from Google to replace HTTP). I seek comments on these.
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The proposed withdrawal of Google from China has gotten a lot of coverage lately. The issue indicates an extreme example of government involvement in ICT. Here are some ‘between the headlines’ insights from a standards perspective:
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Recently, Google posted a much publicised memo called the Meaning of Open in which Jonathan Rosenberg, Senior Vice President, Product Management attempted to define Open. Attempting to define ‘Open’ is a complex task with many contradictions, and it is good that Jonathan has attempted this.
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