Public Policy Group to Promote Open Standards
A group of 200 senior corporate executives and university leaders publishes a 72-page report that examines open standards, open source software and open innovation. The paper concludes that openness should be promoted as a matter of public policy, in order to pursue innovation and economic growth in the global economies.
The group is called Committee for Economic Development (CED) and is a non-profit, non-partisan public policy research organization comprised of business and university leaders.
The CED thinks that intellectual property (IP) law and business practices designed for the trade of physical goods threaten economic development and innovation in digital information product markets such as computer software. It recommends several specific steps aimed at helping public policy makers promote openness, innovation, and economic growth:
Open Standards
- Governments should “encourage the development and use of open standards, through processes as open to participation and contribution as possible”
- The results of government-supported research should be readily available for inclusion in open standards
- Governments should create incentives for early disclosure of intellectual property rights affecting open standards, because historically, companies have waited, in order to maximize damage claims
Open Source Software
- Governments should not mandate any particular license, such as requiring open source software only
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- No citizen should be required to use the hardware or software of any particular vendor
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- International procurements should also supprt inter-operability requirements
Open Innovation (such as ‘peer production’ systems like WikiPedia and eBay user ratings)
- To foster open innovation, federally funded, non-classified research should be widely disseminated, following the example of the NIH (National Institute of Health)
- “Any legislation or regulation regarding intellectual property rights should be weighed with a presumption against the granting of new rights … because of the benefits to society of further innovation through greater access to technology.”
- The NSF (National Science Foundation) should fund research into “alternative compensation methods, similar to those created to facilitate the growth of radio, to reward creators of digital information products”
The benefits of openness are becoming more apparent and are likely to grow as we learn to utilize the new capabilities enabled by information and communications technologies, the report says. More in the full report (PDF) .