Long time readers will recall that perhaps the most high-profile (and high emotion) legal dispute involving standards revolves around the conduct of a memory design company called Rambus Incorporated. The emotion arises in part because Rambus develops and licenses technology, but does not actually fabricate semiconductors. This has made its stockholders particularly partisan, as its stock has risen and fallen in synchrony with its fortunes in court, and its detractors particularly irate, because they view Rambus not only as a patent troll, but also as one that has gamed the standards development process during the creation of a universally adopted SDRAM memory standard. Hundreds of millions, and perhaps billions, of dollars of royalties are at stake.
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is one of those that thinks that Rambus gamed the system and deceived the marketplace, and I'm another. That's why the FTC is asking the Supreme Court to overturn a lower court decision and reinstate the FTC's conviction of Rambus, and why I'm filing another in a series of "friend of the court" briefs in support of that goal.
The following piece is taken from the latest (October-November 2008) issue of my eJournal, Standards Today. The issue is titled, A Standards Agenda for the Obama Administration and includes further articles on that topic. For a free subscription to Standards Today, click here.
The goals of the Obama administration are in tune with — but in some technical respects, ahead of — the technological times. As discussed in the Editorial to this issue, unless certain standards-related dependencies are promptly addressed, the timely achievement of the president-elect's innovation and technology policy will be jeopardized. But, as examined in the Feature Article of this issue, the government does not have the historical competency to address these dependencies. What, then, is the new administration to do?
The following is an integrated suite of recommendations that could be implemented quickly and inexpensively, and without Congressional action. Of the ten proposals, the first is most urgent, as the advisors assembled in this step would provide the experience, guidance and active assistance needed to implement the recommendations that follow.
The following piece is the editorial in the latest issue of my eJournal, Standards Today. The issue is titled, A Standards Agenda for the Obama Administration and includes further articles on that topic. For a free subscription to Standards Today, click here.
Barack Obama promises to be the most technologically attuned U.S. president ever. More than a year ago, he released a policy statement on technology and innovation that detailed his plans to employ state of the art technology to pursue a broad spectrum of goals, such as increasing national competitiveness, providing next-generation broadband access for all, creating a "transparent and connected democracy," decreasing health care costs, acting to prevent global warming, and lowering American dependence on foreign oil. In pursuit of these goals, he also promised to appoint the nation's first Chief Technology Officer.
These are worthy and important goals. Like the other commendable promises the president-elect has made, they will be difficult to realize, for reasons both obvious and subtle. The obvious challenges include a crowded and ambitious agenda, the difficulties of achieving political consensus, and above all, the overarching urgency of addressing a global economic meltdown that demands attention above all else.
But there are subtle hurdles that are equally daunting, if less visible. They include the need to develop a multitude of new information and communications technology (ICT) standards in record time, utilizing a standards creation process that is at best loosely coordinated, frequently contentious, and almost completely independent of government influence or control. Moreover, the current standards development infrastructure was never designed to create the suites of closely integrated standards that will be needed to solve the types of complex problems embedded in the Obama technology and innovation agenda. But while the challenge of creating standards-based solutions may be uninteresting from a policy perspective, an inability to perform in this pursuit may present as serious an impediment to success as any failure to secure requisite funding or garner sufficient Congressional support.
Consider just the following examples from the Obama technology and innovation platform:
Certainly the concept of “one citizen, one vote” must be the bedrock upon which all democratic theory and protections are based. Indeed, any government would presumably have to grant the validity of this tenet, lest its own validity be questioned. After all, at the end of the day, when all else is stripped away, the debatable and the subjective, the polemical and the political, is this not the one undeniable standard upon which everyone must agree, the fundamental principle of natural law that philosophers of any persuasion must certainly unite in supporting?
And yet…
Down through the millennia and even into the present, this simple, seemingly irrefutable standard of equality and representative government has proven to be almost impossible to establish in any democracy as a practical fact.
I Among twenty snowy mountains/ The only moving thing/ Was the eye of the black bird.
II I was of three minds/ Like a tree/ In which there are three blackbirds...
V I do not know which to prefer/ The beauty of inflections/ Or the beauty of innuendoes,/ The blackbird whistling/ Or just after...
Wallace Stevens, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, 1917
Although much of the brouhaha of the OOXML adoption process has abated, the post-partum process of reviewing how Joint Technical Committee One (JTC1), the ISO/IEC body that gave birth to both ISO/IEC 26300 (ODF) and OXMLISO/IEC IS 29500 (OOXML), continues. More specifically, meetings continue to be held in which a variety of related matters are being considered, including the ongoing maintenance of each standard, and whether and how the Directives that control the deliberations of JTC1 committees might profitably be amended to address the concerns that arose during the consideration of these two overlapping document format standards.
Most recently, representatives of JTC1 and the SWG Directives committee met in Nara (JTC1) and Osaka (SWG), Japan to review these weighty matters. As has been the case in the past, a variety of those directly involved in the ODF/OOXML saga wrote about the results of this latest meeting, including three bloggers who attended the Ballot Resolution Meeting that served as the climax of the OOXML adoptive process: Alex Brown, Rick Jelliffe and Tim Bray. You can find their alternately contrapuntal and contrary observations here, here and here, respectively. I did not attend the gathering in Nara, but I have read the recommendations made at that meeting (as well as Alex's, Rick's and Tim's commentaries on them), and ruminated a bit on the recommendations and the events that inspired them. Here is my own sense of what others have also observed.
This is the latest in a series of occasional essays that I call The Monday Witness. This series focuses on social rather than technical issues, for the reasons explained in the first entry in the series. As always, the opinions expressed here are mine alone.
If you hail from one of the hot beds of high tech - Silicon Valley, say, or (in my case) the Route 128/495 area of Massachusetts, you've doubtless heard the phrase "serial entrepreneur." What those words describe is someone who has started several companies, and the phrase, when used, is invariably regarded as a compliment. These days, if such a serial entrepreneur has some major successes under her belt, that makes her one of the elite of the high tech nobility - someone with the golden touch, that can turn ideas into huge returns for founders and investors alike.
But should this really be a compliment?
That may sound like a silly question, until you remember that in order to start a new company, you need to get rid of the old one - or at least leave it in someone else's care. That isn't how the great companies of the past came to be what they are today, and it makes me wonder where we can look to find the great companies of tomorrow.
How do you measure the value of free and open source software (FOSS)? That's a puzzler, because it's, well, free. Moreover, a popular distribution like Linux can incorporate the contributions of thousands of individuals working remotely from around the world. That means that there are almost no associated overhead costs over and above the time of the developers themselves.
Even the question itself is a bit of a misnomer, because one measure of the value of FOSS is not the cost to build it, but rather the avoided cost of not having to do so. Because you don't have to pay anything to download FOSS, and since the same project that developed the software will continue to maintain it for you, using free software can allow you to launch products and services that, for economic reasons, you would never otherwise attempt. In an effect that's near and dear to my heart, that means that competition can reenter market niches that had become locked up and stagnant because entry costs to new participants were simply too high.
Trying to get a handle on the value of FOSS is still a worthwhile effort, though, because it allows people to appreciate the beneficial effects of FOSS in general, as well as to have greater respect for something that arrives without a price tag. By appreciating the amount of effort that goes into FOSS, not only historically but on a weekly basis, it's easier to appreciate the robustness and responsiveness of the product as well. It also helps anticompetition regulators and legislators appreciate the significant pro-competitive effects that FOSS can have.
Today, the Linux Foundation is releasing a report titled Estimating the Total Development Cost of a Linux Distribution that shows just how valuable FOSS really can be, using the Fedora distribution of Linux and the Linux kernel itself as examples. (Disclosure: I am legal counsel to LF.) The effort is particularly interesting as the authors (LF's Amanda McPherson, Brian Proffitt and Ron Hale-Evans) use the same methodology employed by respected industry expert David A. Wheeler in 2002 to value a related Linux Distribution (Red Hat 7.1). The run up in value wrought by six additional years of global collaboration is an eye popper.
This is the latest in a series of occasional essays that I call The Monday Witness. This series focuses on social rather than technical issues, for the reasons explained in the first entry in the series. As always, the opinions expressed here are mine alone.
Election campaigns bring to mind - usually ruefully - standards of many types. Among them are the levels of civility, truthfulness, and fair play that we wish candidates would exhibit when they compete for our votes. But as the day of final electoral reckoning approaches, the gulf between the standards we favor and the conduct we observe on the hustings tends to widen rather than narrow. To my mind, nothing demonstrates a lack of character in a candidate as the degree to which he or she is willing to slander an opponent.
Holding candidates accountable to reasonable standards of conduct and character in this respect has become more problematic of late, in part because candidates and their parties keep developing new ways to distance themselves from sordid practices, while still reveling in their results. Some of these tactics have become sufficiently notorious to contribute new names to the lexicon of electoral dirty tricks.
The 2004 campaign, for example, gave us a new verb: to "Swiftboat," meaning to spread disinformation through an organization that has pretensions to credibility, and also denies any connection to the campaign of the candidate the disinformation assists. The name, of course, derives from the ostensibly ad hoc association of war veterans that sought to impugn the war record of Democratic candidate John Kerry, a decorated Viet Nam war hero. Most recently, we have a new adjective - "Rovian" - derived from the name of former Bush political mastermind Karl Rove. This word is used to condemn (although sometimes with grudging admiration) conduct that is both artful and wrong - such as collaborating with Swiftboaters (yes, there is a noun form as well).
Note: Nominations for the awards noted below will close on October 8, so please act now
I almost missed this story, until I caught a link to it at Bob Sutor's blog. As I was about to do the same and simply add a link to it to my News Picks column, it occurred to me that there's more of a story here than meets the eye.
That said, let's start with the superficial story, as announced in a posting at the ODF Alliance Web site, issued on September 9, which begins as follows (as usual, the full text appears at the end of this blog entry):
Know someone in your community—an individual, government official, NGO or other entity—who has significantly advanced the cause of document freedom, yet whose actions have not received the public recognition they deserve?...The purpose of the award is to recognize the contribution of individuals or entities in promoting ODF adoption, the mission of the ODF Alliance. Here’s how you can help! Nominate an individual or entity you work with closely or someone you have observed who stands out as a leader in the ODF community.
What's remarkable about this story, of course, is not that the ODF Alliance is giving awards to those that deserve them it (why not? It's a great way to advance the Alliances cause as well), but that there are so many people in so many countries around the world that are eligible by reason of their service in support of what was once an obscure software standard. Now, how often does something like that come along?
As I reported yesterday, IBM has announced a new "I.T.Standards Policy," calling for (among other things) more transparency, openness and inclusiveness in the standards development process, and for the use by standards organizations of fewer, clearer and more open-source friendly intellectual property rights policies. IBM also disclosed the wide-ranging, and in some cases radical, recommendations offered by 70 standards experts from around the world. These recommendations are intended to raise the bar in standards development.
Rather predictably, it was one particular aspect of the IBM announcement that drew the most interest - and headlines. The result was a host of stories with titles like IBM May Quit Technology Standards Bodies (Wall Street Journal), IBM Treatens to Leave Standards Bodies (the New York Times) and, to the same point but more entertainingly, IBM Takes a Blunt Axe to its Dealings with Standards-Setters (Financial Times). Clearly, when IBM threatens, people listen. Still, as I observed yesterday,
While IBM's standards activities are formidible, IBM still controls only one vote within any single standards organization. As a result, it will be significant to see whether it is successful in inspiring other companies (and particularly those that were its allies in the ODF-OOXML competition, such as Google and Oracle) to make statements of active support for these same principles.
I'm pleased to say that such words of support are starting to be offered, beginning with this statement of support from the Linux Foundation: