{"id":210,"date":"2012-12-11T21:23:49","date_gmt":"2020-02-18T06:53:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/redfrontdoor.org\/blg2\/?p=210"},"modified":"2020-02-18T16:51:45","modified_gmt":"2020-02-18T16:51:45","slug":"post-204","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/redfrontdoor.org\/blog\/?p=210","title":{"rendered":"UK government consultation on Open Standards"},"content":{"rendered":"

Back in June, I submitted a response<\/a> (also as pp.35–39 of a PDF<\/a> on the Cabinet Office’s site) to the UK’s consultation on open standards in government. Today I received an email notifying me of the conclusions to this process. I have read through the UK government’s ‘Principles’ document<\/a>, and the following snippets are quite encouraging:<\/p>\n

‘Open’ includes ‘royalty-free’<\/h3>\n

I think the big one is the inclusion of ‘royalty-free’ in the requirements for a standard to be ‘Open’:<\/p>\n

2. Open standard – definition
\n…
\nRights – rights essential to implementation of the standard, and for interfacing with other implementations which have adopted that same standard, are licensed on a royalty free basis that is compatible with both open source and proprietary licensed solutions. These rights should be irrevocable unless there is a breach of licence conditions. [p.26–27]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

General use of free\/open-source software within the UK government<\/h3>\n

The Government Digital Service has launched GOV.UK – a simpler, clearer, faster and common platform for government’s digital services, based on open source software. [p.1]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Freedom of choice in software<\/h3>\n

A citizen should be able to choose Free Software to interact with the UK government:<\/p>\n

Citizens, businesses and delivery partners must be able to interact with the Government, exchanging appropriately formatted information\/data using the software package of their choice. [p.8]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The product choice made by a government body must not force other users, delivery partners or government bodies, to buy the same product e.g. web-based applications must work equally well with a range of standards-compliant browsers, irrespective of operating system, and not tie the user to a single browser or desktop solution. [p.9]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Cost of vendor lock-in<\/h3>\n

Recognition that cost of breaking free of lock-in is real, and also that it should be attributed to the legacy solution (as opposed to being a cost of moving to a new solution):<\/p>\n

Value for money is achieved through avoidance of lock-in and providing a level playing field for suppliers to compete for government IT contracts… [p.14]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As part of examining the total cost of ownership of a government IT solution, the costs of exit for a component should be estimated at the start of implementation. As unlocking costs are identified, these must be associated with the incumbent supplier\/system and not be associated with cost of new IT projects. [p.15]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Requirement levels<\/h3>\n

Raised a smile to see the UK government adopt the IETF’s definitions of ‘must’, ‘optional’, etc.:<\/p>\n

1. Requirement levels<\/p>\n

In line with RFC 2119: … [p.25]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Conclusions<\/h2>\n

There were c.480 submissions, and I think it was worthwhile to be one of them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Back in June, I submitted a response (also as pp.35–39 of a PDF on the Cabinet Office’s site) to the UK’s consultation on open standards in government. Today I received an email notifying me of the conclusions to this process. I have read through the UK government’s ‘Principles’ document, and the following snippets are quite encouraging: ‘Open’ includes ‘royalty-free’ I think the big one is the inclusion of ‘royalty-free’ in the requirements for a standard to be ‘Open’: 2. Open standard – definition … Rights – rights essential to implementation of the standard, and for interfacing with other implementations which have adopted that same standard, are licensed on a royalty free basis that is compatible with both open source and<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-210","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","comments-off"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redfrontdoor.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redfrontdoor.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redfrontdoor.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redfrontdoor.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redfrontdoor.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=210"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/redfrontdoor.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2174,"href":"https:\/\/redfrontdoor.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210\/revisions\/2174"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redfrontdoor.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=210"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redfrontdoor.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=210"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redfrontdoor.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=210"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}