UK Government Must Heed Dutch Audit Court Warning Prior To Implementing 'Open' IT Procurement Action

http://www.mondaq.com/article.asp?articleid=131628
UK Government Must Heed Dutch Audit Court Warning Prior To Implementing 'Open' IT Procurement Action

In the recent Guardian article entitled, Government Takes Action on Open Technology,¹ OpenForumEurope (OFE) president Graham Taylor revels in the UK Government's issuance of a January 2011 Procurement Policy Note that effectively reinstated, at least for the UK, the initial version of the European Interoperability Framework (EIFv1.0), despite its having been roundly rejected by the European Commission and Council of the European Union during December 2010 in favor of technology and business model neutrality.

OFE's IGOR

In alleging that the UK action had "shamed some other European countries", Mr. Taylor, however, shamelessly misrepresented how the UK Government hadn't been "open to lobbying pressure". This is a quite remarkable claim given the New York Times' revelation reported last year that the Brussels-based OFE has long served as a "lobbying front"/mask for U.S.-based industry members IBM, Google, Oracle and Red Hat - a/k/a/ 'IGOR' – which quietly but unsuccessfully endeavored to shape the European Commission's EIF project to suit their own interests. It rings all the more hollow considering the OFE's effective lobbying thereafter of the UK coalition government which was reported to have quickly warmed to its FOSS-centric ideas.² Indeed, given the size of the UK government procurement market (£16.9bn spend) and its growing influence over privatemarket behavior, it is no wonder that OFE's IGOR had worked diligently under cover of night within the UK Government's policy laboratory to align the parties' respective interests for purposes of ensuring that the UK government openly endorsed and expressed a clear preference for royalty-freeopen source software-based eGovernment platforms...

UK’s Promotion of Royalty-Free Government Procurement Standards - NOT AS REPORTED

http://www.mondaq.com/article.asp?articleid=129510

United Kingdom: UK’s Promotion of Royalty-Free Government Procurement Standards Not as Reported

April 14, 2011

By Lawrence A. Kogan

FOSS pundits have made much ballyhoo of the recent Procurement Policy Action Note issued by the UK Cabinet Office of Government Commerce (OGC) during January 2011 that defines 'open standards' as including only those which "have intellectual property made irrevocably available on a royalty-free basis" (emphasis added).¹

As an example, U.S. attorney Andy Updegrove, author of one recent article on the subject entitled,United Kingdom: U.K. Comes out for Royalty-Free Standards for Government Procurement,² waxed poetically about the UK government document's noteworthiness. To paraphrase the author's four main points, the UK government Procurement Policy Note is noteworthy because: 1) it includes informal regional as well as national standards consortia among the internationally recognized specification or standards organizations whose 'open' standards can and should be considered by the UK for government procurement purposes;2) its definition of 'open' standards constitutes a legally acceptable "repudiation" (allegedly consistent with the policy space afforded EU Member State governments vis-à-vis the European regional lawmaking institutions) of and permissible derogation from the final, binding European Interoperability Framework adopted by the European Commission during December 2010, following many years of thoughtful deliberation and contentious debate;3) it emulates and embraces a robust definition of 'open' standards that is very similar to that contained within the national interoperability framework adopted during November 2010 by the Indian Government; and 4) it proves that corporate lobbying and forum shopping undertaken at the EU Member State governmental level on behalf of the 'penguin' (open source) and 'software-as-a-service' (SaaS) industry communities can be successful, at least temporarily.

A closer examination of the UK Procurement Policy Action Note reveals that its ostensible noteworthiness and the author's observations relating to the legal and policy issues surrounding it are more nuanced than they have been depicted...