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Open standards are publicly available and implementable standards. By allowing anyone to obtain and implement the standard, they can increase compatibility between various hardware and software components, since anyone with the necessary technical know-how and resources can build products that work together with those of the other vendors that base their designs on the standard (although patent holders may impose "reasonable and non-discriminatory" royalty fees and other licensing terms on implementers of the standard). Many technical specifications that are sometimes considered standards are proprietary rather than being open, and are only available under restrictive contract terms (if they can be obtained at all) from the organization that owns the copyright for the specification. Being an open standard also does not necessarily imply that no licenses to patent rights are needed to use the standard or that such licenses are available for free. For example, the standards published by the major internationally recognized standards bodies such as the ITU, ISO, and IEC are ordinarily considered open, but may require patent licensing fees for implementation. Open standards which can be implemented by anyone, without royalties or other restrictions, are sometimes referred to as open formats. There is little really universal agreement about the usage of either of the terms "open" or "standard". Some people restrict their use of the term "open" to royalty-free technologies, while others do not; and some people restrict their use of the term "standard" to technologies approved by formalized committees that are open to participation by all interested parties and operate on a consensus basis, while others do not.
ITU-T definition The ITU-T, a standards development organization (SDO) that is one of the three sectors of the ITU (a specialized agency of the United Nations) has a TSB director's Ad Hoc group on IPR that produced the following definition in March 2005, which the ITU-T uses for its purposes *: The ITU-T has a long history of open standards development. However, recently some different external sources have attempted to define the term "Open Standard" in a variety of different ways. In order to avoid confusion, the ITU-T uses for its purpose the term "Open Standards" per the following definition: "Open Standards" are standards made available to the general public and are developed (or approved) and maintained via a collaborative and consensus driven process. "Open Standards" facilitate interoperability and data exchange among different products or services and are intended for widespread adoption. Other elements of "Open Standards" include, but are not limited to:
European Union definition In its "European Interoperability Framework for pan-European eGovernment Services" (Version 1.0, 2004), the European Union adopted the following definition: Danish government definition The Danish government in the 2004 document "Definitions of Open Standards" has attempted to make a definition of open standards, which also is used in pan-European software development projects. It states: Examples of open standards Practices: System: Hardware: Software: Patents In 2002 and 2003 there was some controversy about using reasonable and non-discriminatory (RAND) licensing for the use of patented technology in web standards. Bruce Perens 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 software or open source implementations which can be redistributed by anyone. Royalty free (RF) licensing is preferred by Open Source adepts. 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. Quotes See also | ||||||||
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