Companies, public sector organisations, and individuals can face serious problems if they rely on IT-products that are based on proprietary formats and closed standards. Such problems can be particularly severe when an organisation relies on proprietary formats and closed standards for maintenance of their valuable data and information assets. Today, there is a strong movement in Europe to promote products that support open standards. Directives and proposals at European and national levels have been developed in this area. A number of European countries have adopted national strategies for use of Open Source Software and Open Standards in order to stimulate innovation, support interoperability, and avoid lock-in in proprietary technology.
When organisations procure IT-products based on open standards the issue of conformance to the open standard becomes important. Therefore, it is not surprising that some standards development organisations encourage, or even require, reference implementations for their standards in order to demonstrate that they can be implemented. When such reference implementations are licensed under an Open Source license (i.e. "Open Reference Implementations") the Open Standards development process can leverage from the inherent transparency of the Open Source development model used in the development of the Open Reference Implementation.
In this presentation we will elaborate on why Open Reference Implementations are important for an effective strategy on Open Standards, both for a national strategy and individual organisations. We will comment on strategies and experiences from different countries and specifically draw from views in the Swedish context. With the publication of the recently published Swedish strategy (SOU 2009:86) we find that major steps have been taken towards openness in the Swedish public sector, whereas our ongoing investigations show that current practice is lagging behind. We contrast the Swedish strategy (SOU 2009:86) with strategies from other European countries, including Norway, Denmark, and the Netherlands. With a focus on open formats, we will comment on the role for Open Source Software as a means for supporting interoperability and avoiding lock-in effects. We conclude with recommendations for how to achieve a long-term sustainable healthy market for software based on Open Source Software and Open Standards.
Dr. Björn Lundell is a researcher at the University of Skövde’s Informatics Research Centre. Dr. Lundell has been researching the Open Source phenomenon for a number of years. He co-led a work package in the EU FP6 CALIBRE project (2004-2006) and was the technical manager in the industrial (ITEA) research project COSI (2005-2008), involving analysis of the adoption of Open Source practices within companies. He is the project leader for the Open Source Action (OSA) project (2008-2010), and the project leader for a Nordic (NordForsk) OSS Researchers Network (2009-2012). His research is reported in over 60 publications in a variety of international journals and conferences. He is a founding member of the IFIP Working Group 2.13 on Open Source Software, and the founding chair of Open Source Sweden, an industry association established by Swedish Open Source companies. He was the organiser of the Fifth International Conference on Open Source Systems (OSS 2009), held in Skövde, Sweden.