Last year, the Cabinet Office ran a consultation on open standards covering 970 CIOs and academics. The result of this consultation was a policy (PDF) in favour of royalty-free (RF) open standards in the U.K. I’m not going to go through the benefits of open standards in this space, other than to note that they are essential for the U.K.’s future competitive position, for spurring on innovation and creating a level playing field within the tech field. For those who wish to read more on this subject, Mark Thompson, the only academic I know to have published a paper on open standards in a quality peer reviewed journal, has provided an excellent overview.

Normally, I put these battles into an historical context, and I certainly have a plethora of examples of past industries attempting to lobby against future change. However, to keep this short I’ll simply note that the incumbent industry has reacted to the Cabinet Office policy with attempts to redefine open standards to include non-open FRAND (fair, reasonable and non discriminatory) licenses and portray some sort of legitimate debate of RF versus FRAND, which doesn’t exist.

Whilst this is clearly wrong and underhanded, there’s another story I wish to focus on. It relates to the accusations that the meetings have been filled with “spokespeople for big vendors to argue in favour of paid-for software, specifically giving advocates of FRAND the chance to argue that free software on RF terms would be a bad thing” as reported by TechWeek Europe.

The back story is that since the Government policy on open standards was put in place, the Cabinet Office was pressured into a u-turn and running another consultation by various standards bodies and other vested interests. The arguments used were either fortuitous misunderstandings of the policy or willful misinformation in favour of current business interests. The Cabinet Office then appeared to relent to the pressure and undertake a second set of consultations. What happened next shows the sorry behaviour of lobbyists in our industry.

“Software patent heavyweights piled into the first public meeting,” filling the room with unrepresentative views backed up by vendors flying in senior individuals from the U.S. It apparently seems that the chair of the roundtable was himself a paid lobbyist working on behalf of those vested interests, a fact that he forgot to mention to the Cabinet Office. Microsoft has now been “accused of trying to secretly influence government consultation.”

What’s surprising is that the majority of this had been uncovered by two journalists — Mark Ballard at Computer Weekly and Glyn Moody — who work mainly outside the mainstream media. In fact, the mainstream media has remained silent on the issue, with the notable exception of The Guardian.

The end result of the work of these two journalists is that the Cabinet Office has had to extend the consultation and, as noted by The Guardian, “rerun one of its discussion roundtables after it found that an independent facilitator of one of its discussions was simultaneously advising Microsoft on the consultation.”

So, we have two plucky journalists who stand alone uncovering large corporations that are bullying Government to protect profits worth hundreds of millions. Our heroes’ journey uncovers gerrymandering, skullduggery, rampant conflicts of interests, dubious ethics and a host of other sordid details and … hold on, this sounds like a Hollywood script, not real life. Why on earth isn’t mainstream media all over this, especially given the leaked Bell Pottinger memo on exploiting citizen initiatives?

The silence makes me wonder whether investigative journalism into things that might matter and might make a positive difference doesn’t sell much advertising? Would it help if the open standards battle had celebrity endorsement? Alas, that’s not the case and the battle for open standards might have been extended, but it is still ongoing. This issue is as important to the U.K. as SOPA / PIPA were to the U.S., but rather than fighting against a Government trying to do something that harms the growth of future industry, we are fighting with a Government trying to do the right thing and benefit a nation.

If you’re too busy to help, that’s understandable, but don’t ever grumble about why the U.K. Government doesn’t do more to support open standards and open source. The U.K. Government is trying to make a difference. It’s trying to fight a good fight against a huge and well-funded lobby, but it needs you to turn up.

The battle for open standards needs help, so get involved.

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• Government IT’s quiet open source evolution

Mark Shuttleworth recently announced that the release of Ubuntu 9.10 will be code-named Karmic Koala. Whilst many of the developments around Ubuntu 9.10 are focused on the desktop, a significant effort is being made on the server release to bring Ubuntu into the cloud computing space. The cloud effort begins with 9.04 and the launch of a technology preview of Eucalyptus, an open sourced system for creating Amazon EC2-like clouds, on Ubuntu.

I thought I’d discuss some of the reasoning behind Ubuntu’s Cloud Computing strategy. Rather than just give a definition of cloud computing, I’ll start with a closer look at its underlying causes.

The computing stack is comprised of many layers, from the applications we write, to the platforms we develop in and the infrastructure we build upon. Some activities at various layers of this stack have become so ubiquitous and well defined that they are now suitable for service provision through volume operations. This has led to the growth of the ‘as a Service’ industries, with providers like Amazon EC2 and Force.com.

Information Technology’s shift from a product to a service-based economy brings with it both advantage and disruption. On the one hand, the shift offers numerous benefits including economies of scale (through volume operations), focus on core activities (outsourcing), acceleration in innovation (componentisation), and pay per use (utility charging). On the other hand, many concerns remain, some relating to the transitional nature of this shift (management, security and trust), while others pertain to the general outsourcing of any common activity (second sourcing options, competitive pricing pressures and lock-in). These concerns create significant adoption barriers for the cloud.

At Canonical, the company that sponsors and supports Ubuntu, we intend to provide our users with the ability to build their own clouds whilst promoting standards for the cloud computing space. We want to encourage the formation of competitive marketplaces for cloud services with users having choice, freedom, and portability between providers. In a nutshell, and with all due apologies to Isaac Asimov, our aim is to enable our users with ‘Three Rules Happy’ cloud computing. That is to say:

• Rule 1: I want to run the service on my own infrastructure.
• Rule 2: I want to easily migrate the service from my infrastructure to a cloud provider and vice versa with a few clicks of a button.
• Rule 3: I want to easily migrate the service from one cloud provider to another with a few clicks of a button.

So how do we go about creating freedom and competitive marketplaces? The often cited ideal is the electricity industry because of the ease with which consumers can switch between utility providers. However, these providers all offer the same output; the electricity service is standardised. Furthermore we have no relationship to our utility electricity provider and we shouldn’t have to rewire our home just because we have switched.

In cloud computing we do have a relationship with our provider, in the form of our data, code, and meta-data. These will all have to be migrated if we switch between utility computing providers. By the same token we will need the output to be the same, so providers must offer the same interoperable service. The cloud computing industry must standardise the output of various layers of the computing stack for this to happen.

Naturally, more standards should emerge in the application space because there are more types of applications than infrastructure. However, if we want co-operation between providers then no single provider can ‘own’ any of these developing standards.

In the software world this means that emerging de facto standards are likely to be open source reference models i.e. running code. For a ubiquitous and well defined IT activity that is suitable for service provision, open source fundamentally makes more sense. Any value relates to the service provision rather than the marginal feature differentiation of a common activity.

Hence, open source, cloud computing, marketplaces, and standards will go hand in hand. In Ubuntu we will be launching a number of open sourced systems to enable users to build their own clouds. We’re going to be promoting open sourced reference models along with portability between service providers.

Our first steps in Karmic Koala will be at the infrastructure layer. We’re adopting the emerging standard of Amazon EC2 and providing our users with AMI’s and tools to run on Amazon EC2. We’re also providing users with an open source means of implementing their own in-house EC2-like cloud (Eucalyptus). This is not the end but the beginning of a journey, and we will be looking to build ecosystems at all the layers of the computing stack based upon portability and choice.

Mark made the comment that it would be apt to make it easier to navigate the ‘jungle’ of cloud computing. Navigation is inherently all about freedom of movement and freedom of choice. We intend to keep these ideals at the heart of cloud computing.