Defining Open Standards

Defining Open Standards

The first presentation I ever attended about open source was actually supposed to be about open standards . A panel of representatives from some major software companies was trying to define open standards for the audience. They couldn't agree on a definition, and they kept confusing open standards with open source .

By then I had already started working with Open Source Initiative and I was smugly confident about the definition of open source . We had a published Open Source Definition to rely on (see Chapter 1). I understood the relationship between open source and software freedom . But I hadn't the slightest clue what the panelists really meant by open standards . Was it somehow also related to software freedom ?

I believed then, even if this panel wasn't explaining it well, that at least the venerable standards bodies around the world must have found a way for standards to be " freely implemented" worldwide. It turns out that we were all a few years too early. Not until 2002 was an effective definition of open standards published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) that was truly compatible with open source. I'll reprint that definition in full later in this chapter.

Standards are developed by industry consortia that, within the guidelines of the antitrust laws, cooperate to publish specifications for how products should interoperate . A common design or implementation is often essential to help prevent fragmented development of products that don't work with each other. Each participating company is expected to satisfy the agreed specifications in its products ”and each company is encouraged to seek its own way to improve upon the specifications and to distinguish its own products from those of its competitors . As Scott Peterson from Hewlett Packard once described it to me, "Companies cooperate on standards and compete on implementations ."

We couldn't live without industry standards. Standards allow telephones from one manufacturer to work on the communications switches of other manufacturers. All browsers (at least in theory) can display web pages identically if they meet industry standards. Electronic mail systems from different software vendors can exchange email. Without standards, this would truly be a Tower of Babel world.