Open standard

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Open standards are standards that are particularly easily accessible, further developed and used by all market participants. Every standard has to be somewhat open in order to function as a standard at all. In this respect, one could consider the attribute open to be redundant. However, there is often a regulatory interest in defining special openness requirements that a standard eligible for funding should meet, and accordingly only designating standards that meet these requirements as open .

Definitions

The European Interoperability Framework contained in the version 1.0 (2010 with a new version replaces) a definition of open standards for e -Government and the public sector in the European Union :

  • The standard is decided and maintained by a non-profit organization and developed in an open (consensus or majority-based) manner that allows all interested parties to exert influence.
  • The standard is published. The specification is either free or for a nominal charge available and may be freely copied or for a fee and passed.
  • Insofar as the standard or parts thereof are subject to industrial property rights ( patents ), these can be used irrevocably free of charge.
  • There are no restrictions on the reuse of the standard.

Similar definitions exist in the legislation of several European countries.

The following definition was supported by 17 organizations in the Geneva Declaration 2008 ( OpenForum Europe ) and is used by the FSFE and Document Freedom Day , among others :

“An open standard refers to a format or protocol that

  1. is subject to fully public evaluation and use without barriers in a manner that is equally accessible to all parties involved,
  2. is without any components or extensions that depend on formats or protocols that do not themselves conform to the definition of an Open Standard,
  3. is free from legal or technical clauses that restrict its use from any side or any business model ,
  4. is managed and further developed independently by a single provider in a process that is open to equal participation by competitors and third parties ,
  5. is available in various full implementations from various providers or as a full implementation equally for all parties involved. "

Examples

Examples of the smooth interaction of many different implementations of open standards can be found in Internet technology. The Internet standards usually meet all openness requirements.

Internet standards

Document standards

Other standards

Less open standards

The MP3 format is openly documented, but an implementation can only be brought onto the market against payment of costly or very high fees. To what extent this is then considered an open standard is controversial.

Telephony standards are also regularly subject to fee regulations due to the patent situation. These can also differ in their degree of openness. CDMA2000, for example, is subject to more severe restrictions than GSM.

See also

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. European interoperability framework (PDF; 1.5 MB)
  2. ^ Geneva Declaration of the OpenForumEurope Conference ( Memento of April 26, 2013 in the Internet Archive ). February 2008 (PDF, English).
  3. German version of the definition of the Geneva Declaration from the FSFE website, accessed April 30, 2010.
  4. Ecma International Standard ECMA-376 Office Open XML File Formats (English)
  5. ISO document: ISO 26300 , January 24, 2015, for a fee (English)
  6. ISO / IEC 15948: 2004 (English)
  7. http://medical.nema.org/
  8. http://standards.ieee.org/regauth/posix/
  9. SyncML specifications of the OMA (English)