EICTA has published its comments on the Gartner report on the 4th October 2007, while the deadline to submit comments was on the 15th September.
They comment on what is an open standard:
The Gartner report addresses the topic of open standards. However, EICTA notices that the report does not seem to reflect a consistent concept of what constitutes an open standard.[3] EICTA would like to emphasize that there are various ideas about what constitutes an ,,open" standard. Within EICTA, regarding the issue of IPR licensing, there is support for including both RF (royalty free) and (Fair) Reasonable and Non- Discriminatory ((F)RAND) licensing among ,,open licensing concepts".[4]
Well "within EICTA" probably means that they did not ask their 10,000 SMEs indirect members on what was an open standard, but the decision was probably made by a workgroup composed large pro-software patents companies, such as Philips, Alcatel, Nokia, Ericsson, Microsoft, Siemens and the like.
Here is what they recommend:
Therefore, rather than getting stuck on the semantics of an open standards definition, EICTA recommends to refrain from giving such a definition but proposes to take a more pragmatic approach and focus on both technical and non-technical essential requirements and criteria for choice of standards to be used in the EIF/IDABC context and to facilitate decisions from public authorities.
It is up to the governments to decide whether requiring royalty-free patent licensing is the preferred choice as a customer in the context of eGovernment service offerings. Nonetheless, EICTA believes, whether royalty-free or not, that the (F)RAND regime of IPR licensing is appropriate, provided that the (F)RAND conditions are strictly respected by all participants. Specifically, EICTA strongly suggests to public authorities that good standard governance and availability of IPR licenses under the IPR policy of the respective standards organisation or forum are a much preferred solution to avoid vendor dependencies.