Photo by 917pressI recently read here an interesting opinion from Jonathan Zuck, President of the Association for Competitive Technology. I don’t agree with this opinion so much, I just had to write a post about it.

The point mr. Zuck makes is that the definition of open standards and technologies needed for interoperability between information-systems of different member-states of the EU makes it impossible for innovative start-ups to survive, because these start-ups have no chance for survival if they cannot protect their intellectual property, including their technological standards, with patents etc. Without successful start-ups, innovation would slow down, or even stop altogether. I believe this to be untrue.

When we look at the European Interoperability Framework, we see that open standards are an absolute necessity if information-systems are ever going to be interoperable at all. There is a lot of truth in that statement even though certain proprietary AND de-facto standards will help as well (which is what Mr. Zuck calls well established technologies). The article of Mr Zuck states that innovation in the field of interoperability can only be successful if the companies doing the innovation can make their innovations proprietary and protected. The opposite is the case.

Proprietary and inaccessible ‘standards’ have a much harder time making it to worldwide standards than open standards. Those proprietary standards that did become worldwide de-facto standards somehow all seem to be the property of very large corporations indeed. Those corporations do need the protection of patents because of specific choices they have made in the past designing their business models. But Mr. Zuck maintains that the small start-ups that do the actual innovation (only to be swallowed by the big corporations…) would need the technologies to be proprietary. Wide adoption simply isn’t going to happen that way, or at least not before the actual swallowing occurs…..

When we look at many innovative and successful open standards that have been developed in the last decade or so, like Xforms, Xquery, Webservices, Xhtml etc, we see that these have been contributed to by large groups of people from many companies including the large ones. These standards survive all by themselves and are protected by independent organisations rather than big corporations (even if some of them are in the boards of directors…). These standards exist without ever been protected by prohibitive patents or undocumented proprietary features. These standards have evolved and remain innovative with each new version.

We should even note that proprietary technology usually isn’t aimed at interoperability at all. in fact, it is aimed at monopolizing markets and excluding other vendors (or just making it hard and expensive for them). Start-ups that rely on this way of doing business can still be successful, but in an international environment as the EU (or even within a country’s government) they bring more problems than solutions.

I believe that we all can benefit from open standards and open technology since these technologies and standards make life easier and cheaper. And since we pay for our governments (in fact, we own them…) we should have our say about it as well. Let’s not give all the power to corporations trying to extract more money from the collected taxes of the people and choose the open alternatives. If these companies want to sell their proprietary stuff, let them sell it to other companies and corporations, not to us…

The last argument that Mr. Zuck raises is an interesting one:

Public procurement decisions should be based on technology neutrality. Governments ought to buy software on its merits and not through categorical preferences.

This is quite true. Indeed, the merits of the software should be the basis of selection. The ability to inter-operate with as many systems from other suppliers as possible is one of those merits. This interoperability isn’t guaranteed at all when the software does not support open standards and relies only (or largely) on proprietary technologies. The result would be a technology AND vendor Lock-in that is not acceptable at all.

You could argue that ‘maintaining a list of acceptable technologies and selecting based on that list’ is not the same as ‘selecting based on merits’. That isn’t untrue, but the selection is often done by people who cannot fully determine whether the software they select has the ‘interoperable-merit’ because they lack the knowledge to do so. A list simply helps. What remains is a discussion that needs to take place about what’s on the list, and what isn’t, who maintains it, who can contribute and what democratic and transparent procedures exist to govern it’s changes. Now we’re not talking about technology or standards, now we are talking about politics and policy. That’s a different discussion altogether…

I hope you like this article, don’t hesitate to comment!