At Wed, 19 Jul 2006 19:41:03 +0200, Georg C. F. Greve wrote:
Because in the end, and "Open Standard" is something of an oxymoron: if only one or a few players are using it, it is merely a proprietary format or interface, but not a standard.
An Open Standard isn't an oxymoron IHMO. You've got proprietary standards like MP3 and de facto standards like MS Word.
The Dutch government actually requires patents to be licensed royalty-free in their definition of Open Standard (see http://www.ososs.nl/index.jsp?alias=watisos, in the middle there is the English definition). I've seen the EC using this definition too, but got critised for that by BSA/CompTIA/etc, so I'm not sure they are still doing that.
I think using this definition is the way to go: nobody is against Open Standards, the only thing you've convince people of is that a standard isn't open when patents aren't licensed royalt-free.
Jeroen Dekkers