Statement made on 23 Feb 2009

As NESSI is a consortium of 22 (soon more) partners and over 300 members there is not a common position on IPR policies and therefore I suggest not to repeat all dicussions that have been led in the past.

Openness is a basic principle in the NESSI Vision and SRA:

Open standards specifications must be:

  1. Published without restriction;
  2. Made freely available for adoption by the industry; those standards essential for software interoperable in e-services, and those essential to accommodate the open source community, should be royalty free.
  3. Controlled by an open industry organisation with a well-defined inclusive process for evolution of the standard
  4. Implemented by offerings available in the market; having various vendors who offer solutions enables choice for procurers and longevity for users.

This definition is compliant with EIF V1.0.

The other issue is low participation of industry in standardization initiatives.

In order to increase industry participation this could be supported by a policy initiated by the European Commission. Active participation by the industry could be achieved by:

  1. Supporting the establishment of open alliances and communities to develop and maintain standards
  2. Mandating the use of open standards in public and private procurement as well as through IT governance rules
  3. Participating and taking board level positions in industry consortia such as W3C, OMG, WS-I, etc.
  4. Promoting within these industry consortia the results of EC funded R&D projects