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It has been suggested that Legitimacy of standards be merged into this article or section. (Discuss) |
An open standard is a standard that is publicly available and has various rights to use associated with it.
The terms "open" and "standard" have a wide range of meanings associated with their usage. The term "open" is usually restricted to royalty-free technologies while 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 does the Venezuelan Government. On the standard organisation side, the W3C ensures that its specifications can be implemented on a Royalty-Free (RF) basis.
Many definitions of the term "standard" permit patent holders to impose "reasonable and non-discriminatory" 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 IETFRFC 2026, IETF, ISO, and IEC permit their Standards to contain specifications whose implementation will require payment of patent licensing fees (none of these organizations states that they grant "open standards", but only "standards"). ITU has a definition of "open standard" that allows "reasonable and non-discriminatory" licensing.
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. Tim Simcoe: \'Chapter 8: Open Standards and Intellectual Property Rights\', To appear in Open Innovation: Researching a New Paradigm
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.
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The ITU-T is a standards development organization (SDO) that is one of the three sectors of the International Telecommunications Union (a specialized agency of the United Nations). The ITU-T has a Telecommunication Standardization Bureau director\'s Ad Hoc group on IPR that produced the following definition in March 2005, which the ITU-T as a whole has endorsed for its purposes since November 2005 ITU-T on Open Standards:
The ITU-T, ITU-R, ISO, and IEC have harmonized on a common patent policy ITU-T on IPR under the banner of the WSC. Anyway, the above ITU-T definition cannot be considered also applicable in ITU-R, ISO and IEC contexts, since the Common Patent Policy ISO TC on Common Patent Policy does not make any reference to "open standards" but only to "standards".
The European Union adopted the following definition in its European Interoperability FrameworkEuropean Interoperability Framework for pan-European eGovernment Services, page 17 (Version 1.0, 2004):
USE OF OPEN STANDARDS To attain interoperability in the context of pan-European eGovernment services, guidance needs to focus on open standards. The following are the minimal characteristics that a specification and its attendant documents must have in order to be considered an open standard:
- The standard is adopted and will be maintained by a not-for-profit organization, and its ongoing development occurs on the basis of an open decision-making procedure available to all interested parties (consensus or majority decision etc.).
- The standard has been published and the standard specification document is available either freely or at a nominal charge. It must be permissible to all to copy, distribute and use it for no fee or at a nominal fee.
- The intellectual property - i.e. patents possibly present - of (parts of) the standard is made irrevocably available on a royalty-free basis.
- There are no constraints on the re-use of the standard.
The Danish government has attempted to make a definition of open standards "Definitions of Open Standards", 2004, which also is used in pan-European software development projects. It states:
- An open standard is accessible to everyone free of charge (i.e. there is no discrimination between users, and no payment or other considerations are required as a condition of use of the standard)
- An open standard of necessity remains accessible and free of charge (i.e. owners renounce their options, if indeed such exist, to limit access to the standard at a later date, for example, by committing themselves to openness during the remainder of a possible patent\'s life)
- An open standard is accessible free of charge and documented in all its details (i.e. all aspects of the standard are transparent and documented, and both access to and use of the documentation is free)
The French Parliament approved a definition of "open standard" in its "Law for Confidence in the Digital Economy"."Loi nº 2004-575" for the Confidence in the Digital Economy", June, 21nd 2004 The definition is:"Estándares Abiertos".
- By open standard is understood any communication, interconnection or interchange protocol, and any interoperable data format whose specifications are public and without any restriction in their access or implementation.
A Decree passed by the Spanish Parliament "Ley 11/2007" of Public Electronic Access of the Citizens to the Public Services, June, 22nd 2007 requires that all electronic services provided by the Spanish public administration must be based on open standards. It defines an open standard as royalty free, according to the following definition:"Estándares Abiertos"
An open standard fulfills the following conditions:
- it is public, and its use is available on a free [gratis] basis, or at a cost that does not imply a difficulty for the user.
- its use is not subject to the payment of any intellectual or industrial property right.
The Venezuelan Government approved a "free software and open standards law"."Decreto 3390" of Free Software and Open Standards, December, 23rd 2004 The decree includes the requirement that the Venezuelan public sector must use free software based on open standards, and includes a definition of open standard:"Estándares Abiertos"
Article 2: for the purposes of this Decree, it shall be understood as
k) Open standards: technical specifications, published and controlled by an organization in charge of their development, that have been accepted by the industry, available to everybody for their implementation in free software or other [type of software], promoting competitivity, interoperability and flexibility.
One of the most popular definitions of the term "open standard", as measured by Google ranking, is the one developed by Bruce Perens.[original research?] His definition lists a set of principles that he believes must be met by an open standard:
Ken KrechmerKen Krechmer, The Meaning of Open Standards identifies ten "rights":
As one of the important provider of Web technology ICT Standards, notably XML, http, HTML, CSS and WAI, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) follows a process that promotes the development of high-quality standards.
The W3C process defines the following set of requirements that a provider of technical specification must follow to qualify as Open Standard.
- transparency (due process is public, and all technical discussions, meeting minutes, are archived and referencable in decision making)
- relevance (new standardization is started upon due analysis of the market needs, including requirements phase, e.g. accessibility, multi-linguism)
- openness (anybody can participate, and everybody does: industry, individual, public, government bodies, academia, on a worldwide scale)
- impartiality and consensus (guaranteed fairness by the process and the neutral hosting of the W3C organization, with equal weight for each participant)
- availability (free access to the standard text, both during development and at final stage, translations, and clear IPR rules for implementation, allowing open source development in the case of Web technologies)
- maintenance (ongoing process for testing, errata, revision, permanent access)
See also: Open source hardware.
See also: Open format.
In 2002 and 2003 the controversy about using reasonable and non-discriminatory (RAND) licensing for the use of patented technology in web standards increased. Bruce Perens, important associations as FSF or FFII and others have argued that the use of patents restricts who can implement a standard to those able or willing to pay for the use of the patented technology. The requirement to pay some small amount per user, is often an insurmountable problem for free/open source software implementations which can be redistributed by anyone. Royalty free (RF) licensing is generally the only possible license for free/open source software implementations. The GNU General Public License includes a section that enjoins anyone who distributes a program released under the GPL from enforcing patents on subsequent users of the software or derivative works.
One result of this controversy was that many governments (including the Danish, French and Spanish governments singly and the EU collectively) specifically affirmed that "open standards" required royalty-free licenses. Some standards organizations, such as the W3C, modified their processes to essentially only permit royalty-free licensing. Oasis-Open allows committees to operate either on a RAND basis or a royalty-free basis, but OASIS does say to grant "open standards" when they are not royalty-free.
Patents for software, formulas and algorithms are currently enforceable in the US but not in the EU. The European Patent Convention Article 52 paragraph (2)(c) expressly prohibits algorithms, business methods and software from being covered by patents. The US has only allowed them since 1989 and there has been growing controversy in recent years as to either the benefit or feasibility.
A standards body and its associated processes cannot force a patent holder to give up its right to charge license fees, especially if the company concerned is not a member of the standards body and unconstrained by any rules that were set during the standards development process. In fact, this element discourages some standards bodies from adopting an "open" approach, fearing that they will lose out if their members are more constrained than non-members. Few bodies will carry out (or require their members to carry out) a full patent search. Ultimately, the only sanction a standards body can apply when patent licensing is demanded is to cancel the standard or try to rework around it.
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from Wikipedia
