Open Standards

This is not a defintion nor explanation yet, but a useful citation, differentiating real open standards from proprietary-controlled ones:

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