Openforum Europe says Standards Are Achieving Momentum and Creating Innovation (press release today, 3 November 2008).
According to an article published today in the European Journal of ePractice no.5 (2008), Open Standards are now not only achieving significant momentum in industry and governments in Europe, but also directly contributing to innovation, see the full article.
“Open standards achieve increasing momentum because standard setting actors – companies, governments, and consumers – are shifting a dogmatic to a pragmatic perspective – from adherence to strict principles, to commitment to a path towards openness.”
Graham Taylor, CEO of Openforum Europe says:
“We will continue pushing for these trends to manifest themselves in public procurement. Looking forward, the area of software interoperability, which is best served by open standards, is a topic ripe for framework legislation, due to its ripple effects across the European governance value chain. Currently, it is scattered in dozens of directives, which is not contributing to better regulation”.
Full disclosure: I co-authored the article with Jochen Friedrich, IBM. We happen to be Chair and co-chair of OFE's Standards Special Interest Group. Jochen Friedrich's Open Blog is great, by the way. Among other things, he reveals that in addition to being bright, he is a nice, harmonic guy, as well. The test of that is when you disagree. I would rather disagree with Jochen than with anybody else: I have seen him in action in EICTA and elsewhere. On open standards, though, we are fully aligned. Having colleagues like that in the industry inspires me!
