• McKinsey: What Matters: Creative Commons: Enabling the next level of innovation

  Here’s a thought experiment: try to imagine what it would have been like to create Google before the era of the Internet and open standards. You would probably have had to pay millions of dollars to create the necessary software on a proprietary operating system. The effort would have required a huge team of people taking many years. Since Google is a search engine, it most likely would have been given to the phone company to design and run. If you were using X.25, the international networking standard (the Internet equivalent of its time), you would have been charged for each packet of information that you sent or received, in a network in which each network operator had a bilateral agreement with every other network operator. This total project probably would have taken a decade, cost a billion dollars, and not have worked very well.

  tags: standards

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• EU waffles on open standards in interoperability guideline – Ars Technica

  The European Union is drafting a set of guidelines that encourage government agencies to improve technical interoperability. These guidelines are being documented in the European Interoperability Framework for European Public Services (EIF) which is currently in the draft stage. A recent version of the draft reveals that changes to the text have weakened the document’s emphasis on open standards.

  tags: Standards

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• Nokia vs. Apple: the in-depth analysis

  tags: standards

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• Sun’s MySQL fork survival theory ripped • The Register

  If Oracle screws up MySQL, the community will fork and the database will live on under another name – leaving Oracle high and dry.

  At least that’s the open-source theory. And it’s a theory Sun Microsystems’ executives past and present have recited to placate those concerned by the prospect Oracle, the number-one database vendor, could end up owning the industry’s leading open-source database.

  tags: standards, open, source

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• Guidelines on horizontal cooperation agreements

  EUROPA – Summaries of EU legislation – To help companies determine on a case-by-case basis whether their cooperation agreements are compatible with the competition rules by providing an analytical framework for the most common types of horizontal cooperation.

  tags: standards

• Wi-Fi Is About to Get a Whole Lot Easier – BusinessWeek

  Going Wi-Fi is about to get a lot easier. For many consumers, setting up an in-home Wi-Fi connection point is something of a hassle. Before you can enjoy the convenience of logging onto the Web without cables and wires, you need to hook up some gear and create your own “hotspot.”

  tags: standards

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• iTWire – Industry heavyweights demand fewer standards bodies

  The CTOs of some of the word’s leading IT&T vendors – including Cisco and Microsoft – and some of the largest telcos – including BT, NTT and Telstra – have joined forces in a bid to rationalise what they see as an excess of different, and sometimes competing, organisations developing IT&T standards.

  tags: standards

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• W3C sidesteps Apple over widget-patent • The Register

  The W3C has spent the last three months poring over Apple’s patent on remote updating, and the web standards organization thinks the patent can be avoided by careful wording and tweaking a couple of APIs.

  tags: standards

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• On the future of Open Source thought leadership | Tech Broiler | ZDNet.com

  My last article on Richard M. Stallman’s verbal attack on Miguel de Icaza and his continuing crusade against anyone who doesn’t fit the mold of the Free Software community seems to have struck a chord with those who sympathize with that movement’s ideals to the point of driving them to utter histrionics, unjustified hero worship and irrational thought.

  tags: open source, standards

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• Sources: ‘Light Peak’ technology not Apple idea | Nanotech – The Circuits Blog – CNET News

  “We’ll be evaluating and looking at it as it comes forward,” said Jeff Ravencraft, the USB Implementers Forum president and chairman. “We’ll continue to evaluate and work with Jason’s team.”

  tags: standards

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• Rooms – When Railroads Designed Their Own Version of Time Zones – NYTimes.com

  Taking the broad view of things — or, admittedly, the very broad view — the history of post-Civil War America might be read as the history of expanding corporatization. After all, starting with the victory of Northern industrialists over Southern planters, Big Business has increasingly put its stamp on national matters, from foreign policy and presidential politics to higher education.

  tags: standards

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