Site Menu

Open Standards, their Advantages and Examples.

Also known as Open Formats, Open Standards are much more than just a published specification for storing digital content, media or data. It is a key to freedom. It can be very well explained with a VISA Bank Card, which can be used in just about every bank’s ATM, every credit card machine, everywhere. It is a standard supported and implemented by all by being publically available. In other words, we can call a file format as open if the mode of presentation of its data is transparent and/or its specification is publicly available.

The same is true with Open Standards as well. These formats of storing data can be accessed and modified by software made by just about anybody. Every program is entitled with a right to access such a standard.

Proprietary Standards or closed standards are those standards which are owned by a company or a person. In other words, a file format is proprietary if the mode of presentation of its data is opaque and its specification is not publicly available. It is evident that other companies making the same sort of an application too will make their own standard. This would ultimately lead to issues regarding the migration of standards and even debates about the standards to use also called clash of the standards. Therefore, in order to bring in something which everyone agreed on instead of fighting over something, Open Standards were introduced. Understanding it isn’t all that simple, so we bring you the Open Standard’s definition by former Debian GNU/Linux Project Leader, Bruce Perens –

1. Bruce Perens’ definition lists a set of principles that must be met by an open standard:
   Availability: Open Standards are available for all to read and implement.
2. Maximize End-User Choice: Open Standards create a fair, competitive market for implementations of the standard. They do not lock the customer in to a particular vendor or group.
3. No Royalty: Open Standards are free for all to implement, with no royalty or fee. Certification of compliance by the standards organization may involve a fee.
4. No Discrimination: Open Standards and the organizations that administer them do not favor one implementor over another for any reason other than the technical standards compliance of a vendor’s implementation. Certification organizations must provide a path for low and zero-cost implementations to be validated, but may also provide enhanced certification services.
5. Extension or Subset: Implementations of Open Standards may be extended, or offered in subset form. However, certification organizations may decline to certify subset implementations, and may place requirements upon extensions (see Predatory Practices).

Predatory Practices: Open Standards may employ license terms that protect against subversion of the standard by embrace-and-extend tactics. The licenses attached to the standard may require the publication of reference information for extensions, and a license for all others to create, distribute, and sell software that is compatible with the extensions. An Open Standard may not otherwise prohibit extensions.

Their Advantages over Proprietary standards

Inter-operability and Inter-changeability

Open standards can be seen as an effort to unify the world’s knowledge resources or intellectual property in such a way that anyone, from any corner of the globe should be able to implement a particular sort of a format. Think of it to be the kind of format in which someone in the US stores his data in can be accessed by someone in the remote corners of Africa irrespective of the software used to implement it as its reference implementation would be free to download via the internet.
The proprietary standards on the other hand have implementation rights on selected vendors and application. Unless a person owns such an application, he cannot make use of the data written in that standard. He also cannot make use of any other alternative software for doing so…

• No issues with patents
  As told previously, anyone is entitled to write an implementation of a format. Hence, patents are not at all a problem with open standards. Freedom to use the standard is enjoyed by all.
  Proprietary standards on the other hand have lots of issues with patents. If a programmer writes any application to implement the standard without due permission of the patent owner, he would suffer patent infringement lawsuits. Open Standards, rather than being a closely-guarded secret of one organization, is available to any who are interested in using it.

• Business Advantages
  A corporation would find the use of open standards the most advantageous. Since they cost nothing, they reduce total costs and increase returns on investment. Open standards can make use of automation more efficiently and offer more flexibility. Open standards can be implemented with Open Source programs, which cut costs even further and deliver a greater and efficient use of resources.
  However, proprietary formats reduce choice of applications to be used. It imposes pre-conditions on both the corporation as well as the customer level. This could be the reason why Customers prefer open standards to proprietary ones, as they give them more choices, and increase their ability to interact with other companies, troubleshoot problems, hire skilled workers, and expand in the future.

Selected Examples of Open Standards

You people would know many of these standards already. Read on, as these are the formats acceptable everywhere.
PDF (Portable Document Format, A Publishing Standard)

• ODT (Open Document Format for Office documents)
• TXT (Unformatted Text)
• HTML/XHTML (Hyper Text Markup Language)
• PNG (Portable Network Graphics, An Image format)
• SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics)
• FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec, a lossless audio format)
• OGG (Ogg Vorbis, a lossy audio format)

Notice the thing common between all these formats? They can be implemented by several programs from several makers. They deliver more choice to the public; hence help in preventing vendor lock-in. In this way, they make file sharing across the globe easier.

More on Open Source Software

 

In This Section

+ Site Features

Quotable Quotes

Did You Know...