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UK Government: Open Standards Must be RF, not FRAND – Open Enterprise.

I suppose I’d like to agree that Royalty-Free standards are always preferable to Fair, Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory (FRAND), and certainly in the standards to which I lend my voice (ODF), I argue that it must be RF. But what holds for ODF need not hold for all standards; not all things are the same. Being pragmatic means accepting that. And it means, too, that you try to surf a wave, not cut a channel to the island or continent where we live together, not apart.  Florian Mueller, in a blogpost of last October, perhaps accidentally uses his mobile to illustrate the advantage of FRAND. A mobile connects, and yet it is in and of itself, isolated.