In Denmark the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation has heralded the release of Microsoft’s XML schema for exchange of documents as an open standard for documents exchange with Danish public agencies and institutions. Among other issues this raises the question whether an open standard can be owned by a private company and – as is the case with Microsoft’s XML schema – patented.
My personal belief is that there is no reason why an open standard cannot be patented. The real test to whether the standard is not whether it is privately own or patented but whether it is released to other people’s use on a license that is open in an “open source way”. That means that the use of the standard should be free to everybody and that it should be alloved the make changes to it. But with such license terms who would want to patent the standard in the first place.
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