New and open IBM standards policy revealed

Davey Winder
Tuesday, 23 September 2008 19:48

IT Industry - Strategy

IBM is instituting a new corporate policy that, it promises, will formalise behaviour with regards to creating open technical standards. So just what is Big Blue actually doing to encourage improved quality and transparency of tech standards then?

Open technical standards might well not be top of your list of interesting things to think about on the beach. However, as any geek knows, such standards are vital when it comes to ensuring that electronic devices and software programs are able to successfully interoperate with one another.

Which is probably why, being of the geek ilk myself, I get a little twitch of excitement (yes I am that sad) when IBM gets in touch to talk about a new IT standards policy.

I would not get quite as excited as the IBM spokesperson who started talking about how integral open technical standards are in the globally integrated economy.

Integral to delivering disaster relief services and health care no less. I had my hand on the CS Gas trigger as the talk moved into the ability to enable governments to create economic development platforms and deliver services to their citizens.

Thankfully, IBM soon returned to Planet Earth and got on with the nitty gritty of the announcement.

Effective immediately, IBM tells me, a new corporate policy to formalise it 's behaviour when helping to create open technical standards is being implemented. The tenets of this new policy being to:

Begin or end participation in standards bodies based on the quality and openness of their processes, membership rules, and intellectual property policies.

Encourage emerging and developed economies to both adopt open global standards and to participate in the creation of those standards. 

Advance governance rules within standards bodies that ensure technology decisions, votes, and dispute resolutions are made fairly by independent participants, protected from undue influence.

Collaborate with standards bodies and developer communities to ensure that open software interoperability standards are freely available and implementable.

Help drive the creation of clear, simple and consistent intellectual property policies for standards organisations, thereby enabling standards developers and implementers to make informed technical and business decisions.

"Common, open and consensus-based technology standards from reputable standards bodies help ensure that each of us can easily purchase and interchangeably use computing technology from multiple vendors" said Bob Sutor, IBM vice president of open source and standards.