I think the current brouhaha surrounding PDF functionality in Office 2007 is an excellent object lesson in why software patents shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near an Open Standard (and software in general!). I’m not sure if a patent is the tool of choice that Adobe is wielding in this particular example, but even if it’s not Patent’s present a large risk to Open Standards and should be resisted.

It’s the same as the distinction between a Shared Source program and Open Source or Free Software. You may have the source code for a shared source program and be able to see how it is implemented and how it operates, but there are restrictions preventing you from doing anything with that information. Likewise a standard shouldn’t be called Open simply because you have details on how it is implemented (although that is undoubtably a critical part of openness). An Open Standard should be one which is openly specified and completely free of any other encumberances (such as patents).

Unfortunately I don’t see any of the standards bodies making this a priority. My understanding of the IETF RFC process is that you have to file a statement stating any IP claims but you’re not prevented from standardising somethign that you hold a patent on. W3C and the IEEE seem slightly less prone to this problem as they tend to have committee oriented standards process that require more interaction, but I’m still not aware of any direct efforts to prevent parts of the resulting standard from becoming patent encumbered.

If the lack of truly Open Standards can bite Microsoft it can bit any of us. It’s not an issue we should be ignoring.