EC backs open source

EUROPE HAS stuck her oar into the international debate over who gets permission to engineer the world's electronic documents: she endorsed open standards and gave a coded warning to governments and businesses that rely too much on proprietary standards set by dominant firms like Microsoft.

The European Commission's anti-trust police have already begun investigating the procedures that led to Microsoft's OOXML document standard being approved by an international committee.

Now Brussels has said in no uncertain terms that open standards, like the open document format (odf) that threatens to unseat Microsoft as the chief architect of the world's document housings, are best for business.

Neelie Kroes, the EC's competition commissioner, said in a speech this morning: "I know a smart business decision when I see one - choosing open standards is a very smart business decision indeed".

"When open alternatives are available, no citizen or company should be forced or encouraged to use a particular company's technology to access government information," she said at a conference organised by Open Forum Europe.

The EC's investigation will consider allegations that undue commercial pressure swayed the international votes that led the International Standards Organisation (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Committee to endorse Microsoft OOXML as a document standard.

"No citizen or company should be forced or encouraged to choose a closed technology over an open one, through a government having made that choice first, " she said, with perhaps a passing reference to the price discounts Microsoft has negotiated secretly with governments.

"These democratic principles are important. And an argument is particularly compelling when it is supported both by democratic principles and by sound economics," she said.

The economic case for open standards was clear to Kroes, who echoed arguments made for open standards recently by the New York state government.

"The Commission must do its part. It must not rely on one vendor, it must not accept closed standards, and it must refuse to become locked into a particular technology – jeopardizing maintenance of full control over the information in its possession," said Kroes.

The EC declared last year that the use of open standards would become a requirement of all its procurements in order to ensure that systems were interoperable.

She did not dismiss proprietary standards outright. The market often did a good job of finding its own best standards and these were often proprietary. Committees couldn't decide everything and the patent and copyright systems had demonstrated how rewarding innovation with cash could encourage more innovation.

Only, she said, the patent and copyright systems were imperfect. Commercial organisations could abuse them to win the "perpetual exclusion" of competitors from their markets, "based on technology that is not even innovative".

She concluded, therefore, that any balance between the encouragement of proprietary standards and the imposition of open standards must be based on evidence. Evidence such as that the EC is gathering in its investigation of Microsoft's OOXML standard.

Microsoft was unavailable for comment. µ