An open standard is a standard that is publicly available and has various rights to use associated with it, and may also have various properties of how it was designed (e.g. open process). There is no single definition and interpretations vary with usage.
The terms "open" and "standard" have a wide range of meanings associated with their usage. There are a number of definitions of open standards which emphasize different aspects of openness, including of the resulting specification, the openness of the drafting process, and the ownership of rights in the standard. The term "standard" is sometimes restricted to technologies approved by formalized committees that are open to participation by all interested parties and operate on a consensus basis.
The definitions of the term "open standard" used by academics, the European Union and some of its member governments or parliaments such as Denmark, France, and Spain preclude open standards requiring fees for use, as do the New Zealand, South African and the Venezuelan governments. On the standard organisation side, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) ensures that its specifications can be implemented on a royalty-free basis.
Many definitions of the term "standard" permit patent holders to impose "reasonable and non-discriminatory licensing" royalty fees and other licensing terms on implementers and/or users of the standard. For example, the rules for standards published by the major internationally recognized standards bodies such as the IETF, ISO, IEC, and ITU-T permit their standards to contain specifications whose implementation will require payment of patent licensing fees. Among these organizations, only the IETF and ITU-T explicitly refer to their standards as "open standards," while the others refer only to producing "standards." The IETF and ITU-T use definitions of "open standard" that allow "reasonable and non-discriminatory" patent licensing fee requirements.
The term "open standard" is sometimes coupled with "open source" with the idea that a standard is not truly open if it does not have a complete free/open source reference implementation available.
Open standards which specify formats are sometimes referred to as open formats.
Many specifications that are sometimes referred to as standards are proprietary and only available under restrictive contract terms (if they can be obtained at all) from the organization that owns the copyright on the specification. As such these specifications are not considered to be fully Open.
Read more about Open Standard: Examples of Open Standards, Patents, Quotes
Famous quotes containing the words open and/or standard:
“But let me open up my heart to you completely, my friends: if there were gods, how could I bear not being a god! Hence, there are no gods. I drew this conclusion, to be surebut now it draws me.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (18441900)
“Error is a supposition that pleasure and pain, that intelligence, substance, life, are existent in matter. Error is neither Mind nor one of Minds faculties. Error is the contradiction of Truth. Error is a belief without understanding. Error is unreal because untrue. It is that which seemeth to be and is not. If error were true, its truth would be error, and we should have a self-evident absurditynamely, erroneous truth. Thus we should continue to lose the standard of Truth.”
—Mary Baker Eddy (18211910)