This week the Dutch government will discuss a proposal to switch as much as possible to open standards and open source software. The Microsoft director for the Netherlands, Theo Rinsema, responded that Microsoft is not objecting to open standards, but the proposal excludes too many not open standards, like PDF, MP3 and GSM, which are widely accepted standards.

Software standards must be implementable in any software or business model, including those based on Free Software. When patents are included in software standards, they need to be licensed in a manner that doesn’t restrict their implementation in any way. Besides the absence of any other restriction, that means royalty-free licensing to any party implementing the standard.

Bob Sutor discusses the effect of open source and open standards on innovation and markets. Specific topics include the effects of open source alternatives on software markets, open standards and interoperability, the new social aspect of software and the open source community.

The newly elected German government plans to support open standards and open source software. In its four-year coalition contract, the government led by chancellor Angela Merkel, writes it wants to orient its IT systems on open standards and include open source solutions.

Industry standards may not be open (e.g., Microsoft Word file formats) so there are reverse-engineering risks with any OSS dependent upon those standards. The MoJ preference for open standards (e.g., Open Document Format, which is now supported even by Microsoft) lessens this risk.

In a huge win for open standards, free and open source software and the public, the long-awaited UK government definition of open standards has come down firmly on the side of royalty-free, not FRAND. The UK government list seven principles as defining an open standard.

the Dutch government has recently attracted Microsoft's anger by launching an actionplan to adopt open standards, and concretely OpenDocument Format by April 2008 in the national government. Open Standards will become mandatory and Free Software will be preferred. As the Minister of State, Frank Heemskerk, argued, this plan is not to exclude any company, but to stimulate information exchange, vendor independence and choice for various software products that implement open standards. he Ministry of Economical Affairs has published an English version of the plan on its site today.

Microsoft's Open XML is not as bad as it has been made out to be, while the Open Document Format (ODF) has many "misleading" claims, according to an open standards activist.

Some commenters think I was unfair to IBM in my last post. There I took Big Blue to task for its announcement that it intends to wage war against Microsoft in the world’s standards bodies