Under the CC0 the copyright holder can waive all copyrights and related or neighboring rights that he or she has over the work, such as moral rights (to the extent waivable), publicity or privacy rights, rights protecting against unfair competition, and database rights and rights protecting the extraction, dissemination and reuse of data.

This is great news for democratic access to and use of public information in the Netherlands as well as for Dutch taxpayers who now as the default rule will be allowed to freely reuse the materials that they paid for the creation of in the first place.

There is really no reason why the Danish Government should not adopt the same policy!

UPDATE: The UK Government has decided on 1 April 2010 to let the data made public at data.gov.uk be released under the OS OpenData Licence which explicitly has been made compatible with the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.

Danish Open Source Vendors' Association (OSL)

Many years ago (10 December 2003), I helped to cofound an organisation with the aim of uniting all the good forces to promote the commercial use of open source in Denmark. The result was The Danish Open Source Vendors’ Association (aka OSL – an acronym from the Danish name Foreningen af Open Source Leverandører). Yesterday, OSL held another general meeting where among other more important things I was reelected to its board of directors for another 2 year period.

The mood at this year’s general meeting was joyous. In late January 2010, OSL could declare victory in maybe the most important and hard fought battle that OSL has been part of since its formation.

On 29 January 2010 the Danish Parliament (Folketinget) decided unanimously to place the ODF standard as the only compliant open standard for editable documents on the list of open standards to be used by the Danish public sector.

Open Document Format (ODF)

This decision reverses the prior opinion by the Danish National IT and Telecom Agency (NITA) and the panel of experts appointed by NITA that the list should be comprised by two competing standards – ODF and OOXML. Microsoft lobbyied hard for OOXML to kept on the list, but in the end common sense prevailed.

That Denmark has opted for ODF brings us on par with other countries such as the Netherlands.

True, the actual wording of the decision by the Danish Parliament leaves room for interpretation.  And surely, the proponents of OOXML will try to tweak this to their advantage in the future. So OSL and other believers and open standards will have  to stay alert.

But the status quo today is undeniably that

• that there is clear political majority in the Danish Parliament in favour of ODF,
• ODF is currently the only compliant standard on the list,
• ODF is thus the current reference for open standards for editable documents, and
• all other “competing” documentsformat will have to comply with the requirement that they should be fully compatible with other open standards.

Its been a lot work for OSL the last couple of years trying to turn a defeat (when it seemed that Microsoft had persuaded a majority of the Danish Parliament into opting for “a two standards solution”) into a victory. Truly a good reason for celebration. And credits and kudos go to the indefatigable Morten Kjærsgaard, long time chairman of OSL!

It has been known for at long time that open source has great potential for developing countries. But there also seems to be the perception in the open source community that the love affair between open source and developers in emerging economies are somewhat skewed. Developers love open source software because of its high quality but maybe even more because it is free – that is free as in free beer.  The developers however have a tendency not to give anything back. They like to get the free code but not to contribute their own modifications back. I am not saying that this attitude always prevail – see next paragraph – but more than a few of the Indians that I talked to at the conference seemed to confirm my suspicion.

I will posit though that this will change soon as Indian IT-companies – as they already have to a large extent – moves up the value chain. As these firms are gaining ever bigger presence in the market for high-quality project management and consultancy the value that they bring to their customer will be service on top of the software. And for such a service based business model open source software fits like hand in glove.

Kapil Bhalla (right) and Rajeeva Parasar of Tricon Infotech

There are probably many Indian IT-companies that already today could reposition themselves as “open source companies” as in providing services and development regarding primarily open source solutions. One such company is Tricon Infotech, two partners of which Reejava Parasar and Kapil Bhalla I had the pleasure to met today in Bangalore. Tricon provides software development & support services across the globe in different business models, which includes Fixed Price Turnkey Projects, Time & Material Projects, Offshore Maintenance & Offshore Development Center.

As Kapil and Rajeeva firmly convinced me the majority of the platforms and projects that Tricon today builds their solutions for customer is in fact open source. And Tricon also contributes code back to several open source projects.

I don’t see any reason why a company like Tricon shouldn’t to the benefit of all – in particular the company itself – become much more active in the open source communities relevant to their solutions and brand this commitment much more openly. Why not reinvent themselves as an open source service and development company?

ITECHLAW Asia 2010

Yesterday I gave a presentation at the 2010 annual ITECHLAW Asia conference in Bangalore titled Distribution in Open Source. The presentation is available in long and short versions at Slideshare.

It seems to me that most legal issues regarding open source licenses only arise when the user (the licensee) has actually distributed the original open source licensed code or her modification hereof. If the user only runs the code (including modifications hereof) internally then all those obligations or restrictions imposed on the licensee under all open source licenses are not applicable.

If you only use the open source code internally you (probably) do not have to preserve the copyright notice or the license terms in the source files, your patents (if you have such) will not be affected and – maybe most importantly – copyleft will not be triggered.

Thus, distribution is important. The questions that I try to give answers to in my presentation is why is distribution important? (see above for starters) and how is distribution defined in copyright law and open source licenses? And what about the border cases such employees, freelancers/contractors, outsourcing and M&A?