Further reading: primary sources and reference works

Procurement and policy surveys

Ariadne: software choice in a mixed economy. Ariadne examines institutional software decisions, including licensing, communities, interoperability and the local context of further and higher education.

Wikipedia: government procurement. This reference explains public bodies’ purchase of goods, works and services, with purchasing methods, competition and broader policy questions.

WTO: Agreement on Government Procurement. The WTO’s overview explains the agreement’s plurilateral character and principles governing covered purchasing and supplier opportunities among participating parties.

Wikipedia: procurement in the European Union. This account covers the European procurement framework, its directives and approaches to awarding public contracts for goods, services and works.

Wikipedia: Federal Acquisition Regulation. The overview describes procurement rules used by United States executive-branch agencies and the purposes of the federal acquisition system.

GOV.UK: open source in public technology. The guidance discusses equal consideration of open source, costs, support, staff skills, maintenance, security and compatibility when selecting technology.

Wikipedia: public-institution adoption. The country-by-country account records public-sector adoption and policy examples, including Brazil. It concerns particular institutions and episodes rather than a universal purchasing rule.

CSIS: government open-source policies. The survey organizes government actions by country, institution, action type, date and status, distinguishing proposals, approved actions and unsuccessful bills.

Licenses and definitions

OSI: Open Source Definition. The Open Source Initiative sets out licensing criteria covering redistribution, source code, derived works and nondiscrimination; code access alone is insufficient.

OSI: approved licenses. The approved-license page explains compliance with the Open Source Definition and the process through which the organization considers license approval.

Wikipedia: free software. The account explains software users’ freedoms and the distinction between freedom and price, alongside terminology used in the free-software movement.

Wikipedia: GNU General Public License. This overview describes the GPL license family, its copyleft conditions and the relationship between distribution of covered works and source-code obligations.

Wikipedia: BSD licenses. The article compares BSD license forms and notice requirements, explaining the conditions attached to this permissive approach to software distribution.

Wikipedia: Mozilla Public License. The overview describes a weak copyleft license, including the scope of its conditions and covered files’ relationship to a larger work.

Wikipedia: Apache License. The article describes a permissive license allowing use, modification and distribution under stated terms, and explains the development of its versions.

Wikipedia: permissive software licenses. This reference distinguishes permissive terms from copyleft and describes relatively limited requirements, including notices and warranty disclaimers found in license conditions.

Wikipedia: proprietary software. The overview describes rights-holder restrictions on sharing and modification, separating license conditions from the availability or purchase price of a program.

Standards and formats

Wikipedia: open standards. The account compares openness in specifications, development processes and implementation rights, including differing treatments of patent-licensing conditions and royalties.

GOV.UK: Open Standards principles. This official publication page identifies the government policy, the consultation that preceded it and later document revisions.

Wikipedia: interoperability. The reference distinguishes systems’ ability to exchange information from their ability to interpret it, and discusses technical and organizational dimensions.

Wikipedia: ISO/IEC JTC 1. This account describes the joint information-technology standards committee and its relationship to ISO and the International Electrotechnical Commission.

Wikipedia: European Interoperability Framework. The article describes the framework for public-service interoperability and its successive versions, placing technical questions within cooperation between public administrations.

Interoperable Europe: the framework in detail. The official portal gives a brief account of the framework’s guidance for establishing interoperable digital public services across public administrations.

Wikipedia: OpenDocument. The reference explains the office-document format, its OASIS development and international standardization, and the kinds of documents the format represents.

Wikipedia: Office Open XML. This account describes the XML-based office-document format, its associated standards and its relationship to office applications and information interchange.

Wikipedia: Office Open XML standardization. The article records the Ecma and ISO/IEC processes and describes disputes about standardization procedures, separating those events from the technical specification.

Ecma International: office-document specification. Ecma’s official description states the specification’s scope for representing office documents, including packaging, markup and requirements for consumers and producers.

Nextgov: OpenDocument and Massachusetts. The report describes international standard status for OpenDocument and Massachusetts’ exploration of plug-ins or converters, including comments from the software-policy coalition.

Computerworld: Massachusetts’ open-formats rollout. The account describes a slower-than-planned Massachusetts rollout and coalition testimony at a Texas hearing, without supplying a complete history of either organization.

Intellectual property and patents

U.S. Copyright Office: copyright. The official explanation distinguishes original expression and fixation from ideas or methods, and explicitly includes computer programs among copyrightable works.

Wikipedia: Computer Programs Directive. The account describes EU program copyright and conditions governing activities such as decompilation to achieve interoperability with another program.

Wikipedia: TRIPS Agreement. The account describes the intellectual-property agreement’s treatment of computer programs within copyright protection, alongside other rights and conditions in the agreement.

Wikipedia: trade secrets. The reference explains information kept confidential because of its business value and distinguishes trade-secret protection from other intellectual-property rights.

Wikipedia: software patents under the EPC. This account discusses the convention’s exclusion and EPO practice, including the distinction between programs as such and inventions with technical character.

Wikipedia: the computer-implemented-inventions proposal. The legislative account follows the Commission proposal, Parliament amendments, Council position and rejection, attributing the arguments made by supporters and opponents.

European Patent Office: patentable inventions. The official provision states patentability requirements and categories excluded from the concept of invention, together with the limitation on those exclusions.

European Patent Office: programs for computers. The examination guidelines explain technical character and further technical effect, distinguishing these concepts from normal physical interactions between a program and computer.

Cornell LII: patentable inventions. The statutory text gives United States categories of patentable subject matter, subject to the other conditions and requirements of patent law.

USPTO: subject-matter eligibility. The examination guidance discusses statutory categories and judicial exceptions, presenting the agency’s framework for evaluating subject-matter eligibility in patent applications.

Wikipedia: Bayh–Dole Act. This account explains ownership of federally funded inventions and changes in contractor and agency arrangements associated with the research-funding legislation.

Cornell LII: United States Government works. The statutory text addresses copyright in government works and copyrights transferred to government, with specified provisions concerning certain covered works.

Health information technology

Wikipedia: electronic health records. The reference describes digital record contents and sharing between care settings. Its subject is information systems rather than an individual medical recommendation.

HL7: FHIR overview. The specification describes resource-based information structures, reusable elements, metadata and extensions for exchanging health information between different software applications.

National Library of Medicine: SNOMED CT. The official overview describes comprehensive clinical terminology, access arrangements and its role among designated standards for electronic health-information exchange.

ONC: information blocking. The agency explains interference with electronic health-information access, exchange or use, alongside the actors, knowledge standards and exceptions covered by the rules.

MedlinePlus: personal health records. The public-information page describes personal records and information they may contain, providing general background on keeping track of health information.

PubMed: health-information-exchange review. This systematic-review record examines exchange and health-care outcomes, with information about study designs and the geographic concentration of the included settings.

PubMed: interoperable-records and exchange review. The record describes adoption, use and impact of interoperable records across settings, including qualifications about how the quality of studies was assessed.

PubMed: interoperability, safety and quality review. This review concerns record interoperability in high-income settings and describes variation in interventions, designs and measurements that limits interpretation of findings.

PubMed: adult access to electronic records. The Cochrane record examines adult access to electronic records and additional functions, explaining uncertainty and limitations in the quality of the evidence.

PubMed: open-source records in low-resource settings. The review assesses software features and constraints relevant to low-resource settings, rather than comparing open-source licenses as causes of clinical outcomes.

PubMed: telemedicine for musculoskeletal disorders. The umbrella-review record brings together reviews of telemedicine for musculoskeletal conditions and discusses methodological quality and gaps in the outcome evidence.

En español

Wikipedia en español: software libre. This Spanish-language reference explains freedoms to use, study, modify and distribute software, with a distinction between the meaning of freedom and price.

Wikipedia en español: estándar abierto. The Spanish account presents definitions of open standards and differences over access and implementation conditions in the debate about their meaning.

Wikipedia en español: interoperabilidad. This Spanish explanation describes interoperability between systems and organizations, including dimensions beyond technical communication and the exchange of data.

Wikipedia en español: Esquema Nacional de Interoperabilidad. The reference describes criteria and recommendations for information handling by Spanish public administrations and its relationship to other systems and citizens.

Wikipedia en español: neutralidad tecnológica. The article explains technological impartiality in public administration and the conditions under which users can access services through electronic channels.

Wikipedia en español: OpenDocument. This Spanish reference covers the office-document format, its standardization and the relationship between information formats and applications that read or write them.