European Commission

The European Commission (EC), the central governing body of the EU, has in the past several years pursued ICT policies that increasingly have been good for "openness" in the areas of standards, data, and software. Its recent announcements on cloud computing have continued this theme.

However, as with any broad strategy of this magnitude, there are parts of the strategy (many well-meaning) that could lead to trouble. Attention, engagement, and follow-up with the Commission are needed to assure a positive outcome.

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Observing the open source public policy landscape over the past several months, one couldn’t be blamed for feeling optimistic. Government after government, it seemed, was stepping up and laying the ground work for public-sector adoption and private-sector growth of open standards and open source software (see articles on France, the UK, Portugal, and the US). Even the Vice President of the European Commission, Neelie Kroes, gave a full-throated endorsement of open source in late December.

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It is hard to think of any environment as conducive to innovation as the Internet. With a good idea and the motivation to follow it through, anything is possible. Look at Wikipedia, the Google search engine, and Facebook, to name just a few success stories.

Behind them are thousands of less famous web-based innovations that are also having a huge impact on society. These include many thousands of small firms and individual web developers based in Europe.

Collaboration is vital. Technologies do not emerge out of the blue. They are built on innovations by others – building-block technologies that are offered up as industry standards. » Read more

In December, the long awaited version 2.0 of the European Interoperability Framework (EIF) was released by the European Commission. Version 1.0 had defined “open standard” as royalty-free, a definition of enormous impact on standards policy because it focused on the user perspective rather than the perspective of standards development organizations. Some standards organizations claim that “open standards” refers only to the way the standard was developed – not the terms of availability. » Read more

After a decade-long battle, terms of a settlement agreement were finally reached last week between the European Commission and Microsoft regarding anticompetitiveness. » Read more