Is there an inherent tension between the FRAND, as implemented by many Standard Setting Organizations, and the imperatives of Open Source software development? In one word, no.
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As Elena Santiago has mentioned, we are undertaking a major effort to improve access to standards and the standards process for SMEs – in the process these measures will benefit all stakeholders.

The study to which Elena referred contained no less than 58 recommendations. Each one is already being implemented in one way or another by one or more of our members. What we are doing is simply to try to extend these existing good practices as widely as possible within CEN-CENELEC and our members.

The recommendations have been grouped into a number of areas of which the major ones are :

- Increasing Awareness/ Education and Communication (web sites, training etc – noting we also have in the ESOs a Joint Working Group on how to improve this generally);

- Improving Access to Standards – Search Facilities, Information and Price (packages for reduced-price access, read-only access for drafts, abstracts of European Standards free of charge on line);

- Easier Use of Standards (making the text easier to understand, fewer cross-references etc);

- Increased Participation – Information on New Projects and how to get involved.

We intend to complete this exercise by the end of 2011. We think this should dramatically improve understanding of openness, noting that many of the issues are in fact related to difficulties to communicate to the market, rather than being barriers as such.

With a brewing standards war heating up, eBooks are expected by many to revolutionize the publishing industry in much the same way that digital music revolutionized the music industry. China in particular has seen considerable growth in both eBook technology uptake and investment, and is expected to reach 30% of the global market the year.

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In the ‘arranged marriage’ of states and markets there are always tensions between serving the needs of individual citizens and consumers versus serving the collective good. Few areas of policy are immune from these debates and standards, as well as global standardization, certainly are not.

Standards and standardisation are becoming more politicized. So what does this mean for the economy and especially for growth sectors of the economy or those which are politically sensitive, such as energy, communications and the Internet?
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The industry backed LTE 4G standard is poised to be a great contender to the existing WiMAX technology. While a few countries have already started rolling out LTE networks, and many more are in the starting blocks, Australia have decided to not follow this development.
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Standards are supposed to be ‘boring’ and formalized but once in a while, we get some very colourful language. The Adobe – Apple debate has been getting a lot of coverage but last week, we reached new heights when Opera joined in the debate and said:

“At Opera we say that the future of the web is open web standards and Flash is not an open web standards technology.”
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A forum and debate on the topic “Intellectual Property, Open Source and Standards: Friends or Foes?” will be held at the Maastricht University Campus Brussels on June 1, 2010. Hosting the event are The Institute for Globalisation and International Regulation at the Maastricht University Faculty of Law together with the Stockholm Network Intellectual Property & Competition Programme.
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In April, Talkstandards.com hosted an open forum on the topic of formal review/ranking of Standard Setting Organisations (SSO). Contributors were asked to discuss whether such review/ranking of SSOs would foster or impede efficient standardization?

Ajit Jaokar argued that any “standards for standards” effort risked the creation of a “class system between consortia” based on an arbitrary set of criteria and will only be more difficult to apply as new innovation becomes increasingly cross-domain (e-health, Mobile health, etc).

Helen Disney, arguing that the priority of an SSO should be promotion of both competition and innovation, identified the criticism that formal review creates more bureaucracy within the standard setting organisations and as such may slow change in dynamic markets such as the IT sector.
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To the question:
• Is a formalized review of SSOs fostering or impeding efficient standardization?

The W3C staff considers that a formalized review of SSOs would foster efficient standardization. We believe that a positive review would help W3C gain additional recognition in the global community for its successes, and that in turn would help W3C earn additional public and private investment in its international efforts.

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The notion of creating standards for standards setting organizations not a new one, but it certainly has attracted more discussion and interest over the past 18 months. The challenge I see with this movement is less in coming up with the types of broad criteria that would be helpful to individual participants in the standards setting ecosystem, there are a host of useful research projects that have done just that over the years. Instead, my concern is related to the idea that there is a single exhaustive set of criteria and moreover a single formula through which those criteria can be passed to create an assessment or comparison of SSOs. Moreover, whatever a systematic or formulaic process such as this might inform us about the SSO itself, I am concerned that it doesn’t guarantee anything with respect to several of the key attributes of individual standards themselves, namely that they be of high quality, relevant and most importantly that they obtain market acceptance.
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