Open Standards

This is not a defintion nor explanation yet, but a series of useful citations.

Citations

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