EU Wants To Redefine "Closed" As "Nearly Open"

Glyn Moody writes "A leaked copy (PDF) of Version 2 of the European Interoperability Framework replaces a requirement in Version 1 for carefully-defined open standards by one for a more general 'openness': 'the willingness of persons, organizations or other members of a community of interest to share knowledge and to stimulate debate within that community of interest.' It also defines an 'openness continuum' that includes 'non-documented, proprietary specifications, proprietary software and the reluctance or resistance to reuse solutions, i.e. the "not invented here" syndrome.' Looks like 'closed' is the new 'open' in the EU."

Re:How hard is it?

[digitalunity]

There has been a lot of compatible PDF viewers, but the pool of PDF creation software is limited. Most OSS solutions implement a subset of the features. Even now, there really is nothing to complete with the feature level in Adobe Acrobat.

To quote Beavis and Butt-head

[Dachannien]

Butt-head: Uhhh, well, if nothing sucked, and everything was cool all the time, then, like, how would you know it was cool?

Essentially, that's what they're saying here. They include closed software on the "openness" spectrum because it's necessary as a basis for comparison. Zero openness is still a value of openness.

Maybe there's an attempt to redefine open source software to the benefit of companies who sell proprietary software, but this particular bit isn't the proper evidence for it.

Re:They don't say what you accuse them of saying

[maxfresh]

Apologies to all for replying to myself, but the most important paragraph was dropped when I copied the section from the original pdf text. Here is the corrected full text:

2.10 Underlying Principle 9: Openness

Within the context of the EIF, openness is the willingness of persons, organisations or other members of a community of interest to share knowledge and to stimulate debate within that community of interest, having as ultimate goal the advancement of knowledge and the use thereof to solve relevant problems. In that sense, openness leads to considerable gains in efficiency.

Interoperability involves the sharing of information and knowledge between organisations, hence implies a certain degree of openness. There are varying degrees of openness.

Specifications, software and software development methods that promote collaboration and the results of which can freely be accessed, reused and shared are considered open and lie at one end of the spectrum while non-documented, proprietary specifications, proprietary software and the reluctance or resistance to reuse solutions, i.e. the "not invented here" syndrome, lie at the other end.

The spectrum of approaches that lies between these two extremes can be called the openness continuum.

European public administrations need to decide where they wish to position themselves on this continuum with respect to the issues discussed in the EIF. The exact position may vary, on a case-by-case basis, depending on their needs, priorities, legacy, budget, market situation and a number of other factors. While there is a correlation between openness and interoperability, it is also true that interoperability can be obtained without openness, for example via homogeneity of the ICT systems, which implies that all partners use, or agree to use, the same solution to implement a European Public Service.

Recommendation 5. Public administrations should favour openness when working together to establish European Public Service while taking into account their priorities and constraints.

Re:How hard is it?

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no software patents in Europe. So all standards are free of patents.
Software patents are the curse of the US software industry, and the food for the trolls. Created to keep american lawyers in the job, and thus unlikely to be removed.

Re:How hard is it?

[init100]

There is no software patents in Europe.

Wrong. There is no directive requiring member states to recognize software patents, but member states can do so if they wish. According to e.g. the Swedish patent office, software can be patented, but whether this has any basis in the law is unknown to me. In other words, the Swedish Patent Office may grant you a software patent, but if the law doesn't recognize software patents, the patent is a worthless piece of paper since you cannot sue anyone for infringement.

Re:How hard is it?

[Bert64]

Yes...
When you do that, you lose any metadata... The PDF output i've seen from "print to pdf" options in programs like word is usually pretty nasty, there are no hyperlinks or clickable indexes, it's just a series of pages...
If you're going to have an electronic file, you want to take advantage of features inherent to it being electronic, since a printed document won't have such features the print option doesn't export any such information.

Try using openoffice to save a pdf file with hyperlinks and a table of contents (create it using the proper toc feature), it works a lot better... pdflatex is also very good at this.