Open standard

From Free net encyclopedia

Open Standards are publicly available and implementable standards. By allowing anyone to obtain and implement the standard, they can increase compatibility between various hardware and software components, since anyone with the necessary technical know-how and resources can build products that work together with those of the other vendors that base their designs on the standard (although patent holders may impose "reasonable and non-discriminatory" royalty fees and other licensing terms on implementers of the standard).

Many technical specifications that are sometimes considered standards are proprietary rather than being open, and are only available under restrictive contract terms (if they can be obtained at all) from the organization that owns the copyright for the specification.

Being an open standard also does not necessarily imply that no licenses to patent rights are needed to use the standard or that such licenses are available for free. For example, the standards published by the major internationally-recognized standards bodies such as the ITU, ISO, and IEC are ordinarily considered open, but may require patent licensing fees for implementation.

Open standards which can be implemented by anyone, without royalties or other restrictions, are sometimes referred to as open formats.

There is little really universal agreement about the usage of either of the terms "open" or "standard". Some people restrict their use of the term "open" to royalty-free technologies, while others do not; and some people restrict their use of the term "standard" to technologies approved by formalized committees that are open to participation by all interested parties and operate on a consensus basis, while others do not.

The Danish government has attempted to make a definition of open standards, which also is used in pan-European software development projects. It states:

The costs for the use of the standard are low.
The standard has been published.
The standard is adopted on the basis of an open decision-making procedure.
The intellectual property rights to the standard are vested in a not-for-profit organisation, which operates a completely free access policy.
There are no constraints on the re-use of the standard.

1 Examples of open standards
2 Patents
3 Quotes
4 See also
5 External links

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Examples of open standards

System:

GSM (a mobile communications system specified by 3GPP)

Hardware:

ISA (a specification by IBM for plug-in boards to IBM-architecture PCs, later standardized by the IEEE)
PCI (a specification by Intel Corporation for plug-in boards to IBM-architecture PCs)
AGP (a specification by Intel Corporation for plug-in boards to IBM-architecture PCs)

Software:

HTML/XHTML (specifications of the W3C for structured hyperlinked document formatting)
SQL (a specification approved by ANSI and ISO, with multiple generations of design and additional less official variants)
IP (a specification of the IETF for transmitting packets of data on a network - specifically, IETF RFC 791)
TCP (a specification of the IETF for implementing streams of data on top of IP - specifically, IETF RFC 793)
PDF/X (a specification by Adobe Systems Incorporated for formatted documents, later approved by ISO as ISO 15930-1:2001 [1])
OpenDocument (a specification by OASIS for office documents)

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Patents

In 2002 and 2003 there was some controversy about using reasonable and non-discriminatory (RAND) licensing for the use of patented technology in web standards. Bruce Perens and others have argued that the use of patents restricts who can implement a standard to those able or willing to pay for the use of the patented technology. The requirement to pay some small amount per user, is often an insurmountable problem for free software or open source implementations which can be redistributed by anyone. Royalty free (RF) licensing is preferred by Open Source adepts. The GNU General Public License includes a section that enjoins anyone who distributes a program released under the GPL from enforcing patents on subsequent users of the software or derivative works.

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Quotes

EU Commissioner Erkki Liikanen: "Open standards are important to help create interoperable and affordable solutions for everybody. They also promote competition by setting up a technical playing field that is level to all market players. This means lower costs for enterprises and, ultimately, the consumer." (World Standards Day, 14 October, 2003) [2]

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