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EU waffles on open standards in interoperability guideline

A set of interoperability guidelines being written by the European Union …

The European Union is drafting a set of guidelines that encourage government agencies to improve technical interoperability. These guidelines are being documented in the European Interoperability Framework for European Public Services (EIF) which is currently in the draft stage. A recent version of the draft reveals that changes to the text have weakened the document's emphasis on open standards.

The EIF's original definition of an open standard stipulated that the standard must be authored through an inclusive process and maintained by a nonprofit organization and that patents covering the standard must be made available under royalty-free terms. A standard had to meet that set of criteria in order to be considered "open" in the context of EU guidance on standards adoption. The original version of the EIF also explicitly acknowledged the interoperability benefits of open source software.

The latest draft version, which was leaked this week, looks very different. ComputerWorld UK points out that the section about open source software has been removed entirely and new text has been introduced that attempts to put "homogeneity" on equal footing with open standards. The new version also has a weaker and more ambiguous definition of what constitutes an open standard.


This statement implies that interoperability can be achieved if everyone merely uses the same exact software. Although a homogeneous environment simplifies a lot of things, it's deeply misleading to suggest that it is equivalent to open standards as means of achieving interoperability. Open standards make it possible for third-party developers to create independent software implementations that can access and manipulate the data. Depending on a homogeneous environment to facilitate interoperability without open standards naturally creates a very strong risk of lock-in.

It's not enough to be able to share content between users of the same software application; you need to be able to pull apart the data so it can be repurposed and used in other systems. This is a key aspect of interoperability. Open standards make data more future-proof and guarantee that it will still be accessible when the software you use to produce and access the data is no longer available or maintained.

The EIF's new definition of openness is also troubling. The text no longer explicitly requires that patents on standards be made available under royalty-free terms. Royalty-free patent grants are important because they ensure that open source implementations of the standard can be created without serious intellectual property impediments. The new draft attempts to address that same issue, but does so poorly—it requires that the standard be possible to implement "under different software development approaches" and indicates that open source software is an example of one such approach.

The ambiguity is potentially problematic. There are some cases where standards are provided under terms that make it technically possible to create open source implementations but with significant impediments that inhibit broad downstream redistribution or make it practically unfeasible. An arrangement like the controversial deal between Microsoft and Novell is arguably an example.

The EIF is still in the draft stage, so it's unclear if the latest revisions will be included in the final version of the document. In general, I can appreciate the need to provide flexible guidelines that will allow government agencies to adopt technologies that are built around closed standards in cases where open technology doesn't meet requirements or would be prohibitively costly. The problem in this case is that the changes to the EIF go much further than that and provide blatantly misleading guidance, particularly on the issue of homogeneity in the context of interoperability.

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Channel Ars Technica