marbux wrote:
> Long before the Obama announced his candidacy, I was working on a candidate
> successor to the various definitions of an "open standard" used by various
> FOSS advocates within units of government.
You specifically asked for critics without legal expertise. In that
regard, I'm eminently qualified. (-:
I think you've got a worthy goal, defining what an open standard is.
But it's a hard task.
I would like to comment on criterion 8, Intellectual Property Rights.
You wrote, in footnote 9:
To the extent IPR[...] provide a legal basis for requiring that
implementations conform to the specification, they are pro-
competitive.
I do not see it that way. In software, 100% conformance to a
specification is just about impossible. It never happens. So if the
owner has not fully waived their rights, they (or their custodian)
could shut down any competing implementation using a nonconformance
argument.
Also, keep in mind that implementations evolve, sometimes quite
slowly. For example, GNU Gnash is what, two years old? It's nearly
usable for playing some Adobe Flash programs, but it's by no means a
complete or conforming implementation. I'd wager it won't be for
years to come. (Yeah, I know. Adobe changed their licensing for
Flash and released the specs last week. But 100% compatible Gnash is
still years away.)
>From my position of perfect legal ignorance, it would make sense to
strike the whole last sentence of criterion 8, the sentence that talks
about assigning IPR to a custodian.
Moving into criterion 10, Conformity Requirements. I do not believe
that the owner/author/creator of a Universally Accessible and
Interoperable Format should have any power of enforcement that
competing implementations conform. There's too much potential
for abuse.
Instead, what you want is a restriction that the original
implementation does conform to the spec and has no extensions. By
"original implementation", I guess I mean the IP owner's
implementation. Yes, that's what I'm thinking. If you have IP
rights, you should have less leeway in implementing a universal format
than if you don't have IP rights.
We've invented the terms "normative" and "non-normative" which
capture much of what you're getting at in footnote 10, I think.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normative#Standards
Going back to criterion 8, I'm also perplexed by the phrase, "that was
unique to the specification when introduced". Suppose I've invented a
text file format called Foo Format. It has a patented feature for the
novel, nonobvious, useful inclusion of text which is displayed in
boldface. I want Foo Format adopted as a Universally Accessible and
Interoperable Format, but I don't want to waive my patent on bold
text. So I create a second format, Bar Format. Bar Format also has
bold text. By my reading of your document, I wouldn't be required to
waive the boldface patent for Foo Format users because the IP is also
used in Bar Format.
Why did you insert that phrase? You're thinking of something I
haven't thought of.
Criterion 12, Complex specifications: Are you implying that an
implementation that supports profile X must also interoperate with all
profiles that are subsets of X? If so, you should say so explicitly.
I hope you find these comments helpful.
--
Bob Miller K<bob>
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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