Open standards

Description

Open standards are available and free for all. It is subject to transparent input and transparent output. The standard that has been published is available either freely or at nominal charge and is permissible to all to copy, distribute and use. The intellectual property for eg: patents possibly present as parts of the standard is made irrevocably available on a royalty-free basis.

Enablers

1) Flexibility : No constraints on the re-use of that standard

2) Openess : Participation opens to all interested people and can be implemented by any development model as interoperability is independent from choice of application and thus ensures user satisfaction.

3) Market demands : Global standard leads to mass-market, bigger overall market and lower prices as well as more effective and relevance

4) Transparency : Easily accesible information

Inhibitors

1) Conflict between vendors' desire for dominance and industry's need for efficiency (common to all industries)

2) Rapid (arbitrary) technological change

3) New technology is harder to standardize

Paradigm

Economic attractiveness depends on many factors such as cost/performance of alternative technologies, switching costs, royalties and etc. There may be a fee to obtain a copy of the standard and such fees may be used to offset cost of managing an open standards process.

Timing

In the late 1990's and the 2000's, a number of companies attempting to use patents coupled with standards to erect "toll booths on the Internet" in a way that would, intentionally or coincidentally, exclude Free Software as well as most work of small-and-medium sized proprietary software enterprises [1]

References:

1. http://perens.com/OpenStandards/

2. http://www.csrstds.com/openstds.html