Open Standards

This is not a defintion nor explanation yet, but a series of useful citations. We are exploring the different aspects of this topic in a separate category with many different articles.

Policy Statements

Bruno Perens in the Sincere Choice platform:

"Intercommunication and file formats should follow standards that are sincerely open for all to implement, without royalty fees or discrimination.

Some software vendors "lock in" their customers through a strategy of deliberate incompatibility. For example, if they manufacture word processing software and their product dominates a particular market, they can force competitors out of that market simply by making sure that no competing product interoperates with theirs. In order to interoperate with the majority of other users, a user will have to purchase the dominant product.

In order to have a fair market, without customer "lock-in", file formats like those used by word processors must be open standards. Then, the customer will have a choice of a number of interoperating products, with various prices, different levels of sophistication, and differentiating features. However, each of these products will be able to display and edit files produced by the others.

The dominant vendors can not be expected to switch to open standards on their own. Only strong and continued pressure from their customers will cause them to do so. But open standards are entirely to the customer's benefit. They help to establish a competitive market that tends to reduce prices and increase quality.

We support reverse-engineering for purposes of compatibility, and oppose legislation that would restrict it. Reverse-engineering is the only tool that competitors can use against a vendor who is not receptive to open standards. Products like Samba and OpenOffice benefit many customers. The developers of those products made use of reverse-engineering in order to make them compatible with other products." (http://www.sincerechoice.org/Principles/Open_Standards.html)

Typology

From Joel West at http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue12_6/west/index.html

"an “open” standard usually has two justifications: open in the process, or open in the outcome (cf. Greenberg, 1990). The open process is the perspective of the standards creators, and is normally associated a particular type of standards–setting organization (SSO) — a formal standards development organization rather than a standards consortium or private firm. The process fairness is achieved through the structure of the SSO: for example, Krechmer (2006) identifies key elements of process fairness as open meetings, due process in voting, and transparency of meeting outcomes.

The other form of openness is openness of outcomes. Buyers seek an open enough outcome to assure competing implementations of the standard, in hopes of providing price competition and thus lower prices." (http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue12_6/west/index.html)

Discussion

Why Standards are Important

Jonathan Schwartz of SUN, in his blog at http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/jonathan/20060515

"When Thomas Edison first introduced the lightbulb, he held patents he tried to wield against potential competitors - he wanted to own the client (the bulb) and the server (the dynamo). He failed. Standards emerged around voltage and plugs, and GE Energy (formerly, Edison General Electric), to this day, remains one of the most profitable and interesting businesses around. How big would the power business be today if you could only buy bulbs and appliances from one company? A far sight smaller, I'd imagine. Standards grew markets and value.

Then there was the civil war era in the US, when locomotive companies all had their own railroad widths and shapes - designed only to work with their rail cars and steam engines. How'd they fare? They failed, standards emerged that unified railways and rail lines, and that era created massive wealth, connecting economies within economies. Standards grew markets and value."

Open vs. Proprietary Standards

From: Irving Wladawsky-Berger, the Vice President of Technical Strategy and Innovation of IBM

"If a crunch comes between the interests of the shareholders and interests of the community, a business has to choose the interests of the shareholders. A business creating a standard that it controls and says is "open" and that people should "trust them" is not robust from that perspective. Business should prevent itself from getting into these situation. Working with neutral professional organizations makes it impossible for such conflicts to corrupt the process and is key to good open standards."

Cited by Joi Ito at http://joi.ito.com/archives/2006/01/17/irving_wladawskybergers_definition_of_open_standards.html

Why Standards cannot be fully open in a for-profit environment

From Joel West at http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue12_6/west/index.html

"no standardization activity that is economically self–supporting can be perfectly open: from an economic perspective, there are limits to openness (West, 2006b). Simcoe (2006) observes that in standardization, firms face an inherent conflict between value creation and value capture. A completely open standard creates lots of value, none of which can be captured; a completely closed standard captures 100 percent of no value created. So a profit–maximizing firm must seek an intermediate point that partially accomplishes both goals.

Thus to pay the bills, there has to be value capture somewhere: everything has some level of openness and some level of proprietary–ness [1]. Typically, standards that are open in one area are often not open in another." (http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue12_6/west/index.html)

More Information

For starters, you may want to read the following:

What you really need to read

1. Open Standards are Important,
2. P2P Standardization processes differ from the traditional media standard process
3. How Open Standards are related to Free Software, which makes a distinction between encumbered and unemcumbered open standards.
4. You have to understand the The Contradiction between Openness and Profits !!

More

1. Requirements for an Open Internet
2. We now need new ethical guidelines for networked applications, where free software licenses no longer protect our freedom, as the data and software are no longer located on our local computers.
3. An Open Standards Primer.
4. A definition by Wikipedia
5. Open Standards blogs are monitored by Technorati [1]