The quality of support from a software community is key to the lifecycle of a technical standard, says Chris Ulliott, Technical Director at the UK's Technical Authority for information assurance, CESG. "We love open standards, they make life easier."
Products can be supported in house, if skills are available, "but standards need external entities to continue development if you want interoperability between products". That is why communities around open source solutions are important for successful standards.
CESG champions the use of open standards, Ulliott declared, speaking at the 'Open Source & Open Standards' conference in London, on 3 April. The discussion should not be about open source or closed source, he said. "The question should be: 'What does good look like?'"
"We love open standards, they make life easier. They let us understand what is going on, and they allow support from multiple suppliers. From a security perspective, a monoculture is bad." The CESG advocates the use of standards that were designed with IT security in mind, and that can be inspected. "How many standards contain magic binary glue?"
Value in contribution
Ulliott recommends that public administrations that develop software solutions, based on or on top of open source, should make sure that enhancements are given back to the community of software developers. "That is where the value is." He added that there are a small number of occasions where for security reasons, this isn't sensible. "But those occasions are the exception, rather than the norm."
Ulliott is one of the members of the Open Standards Board, which is preparing a recommendation to the government's Chief Technology Officer on the use of the Open Document Format (ODF, ISO 26300). The advice follows a proposal from the UK's Cabinet Office last December to use the Open Document Format and HTML standards for sharing and editing electronic documents.
More information:
Open Source & Open Standards 2014 conference website
UK proposal on the use of open standards for document formats
OSOR news item