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An open standard is a standard that is openly accessible and usable by anyone. It is also a common prerequisite that open standards use an open license that provides for extensibility. Typically, anybody can participate in their development due to their inherently open nature. There is no single definition, and interpretations vary with usage. Examples of open standards include the GSM , 4G , and 5G standards that allow most modern mobile phones to work world-wide.

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59-484: OStatus is an open standard for decentralized social networking , allowing users on one service to send and receive status updates with users from another. The standard describes how a suite of various standards, including Atom , Activity Streams , WebSub , Salmon , and WebFinger , can be used together, which enables different microblogging server implementations to communicate status updates between their users back-and-forth, in near real-time. OStatus federation

118-525: A BIOS that duplicated the function of the IBM BIOS exactly but did not infringe on copyrights. The two early leaders in this last strategy were both start-up companies: Columbia Data Products and Compaq . They were the first to achieve reputations for very close compatibility with the IBM machines, which meant that they could run software written for the IBM machine without recompilation. Before long, IBM had

177-615: A clean room BIOS that was 100% compatible with IBM's, and from that time on any competent computer manufacturer could achieve IBM compatibility as a matter of routine. From around 1984, the market was fast growing but relatively stable. There was as yet no sign of the "Win" half of "Wintel," though Microsoft was achieving enormous revenues from DOS sales both to IBM and to an ever-growing list of other manufacturers who had agreed to buy an MS-DOS license for every machine they made, even those that shipped with competing products. As for Intel, every PC made either had an Intel processor or one made by

236-742: A royalty-free basis. Many definitions of the term standard permit patent holders to impose " reasonable and non-discriminatory licensing" royalty fees and other licensing terms on implementers or users of the standard. For example, the rules for standards published by the major internationally recognized standards bodies such as the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), International Organization for Standardization (ISO), International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), and ITU-T permit their standards to contain specifications whose implementation will require payment of patent licensing fees. Among these organizations, only

295-495: A "free software and open standards law." 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: Wintel Wintel ( portmanteau of Windows and Intel ) is the partnership of Microsoft Windows and Intel producing personal computers (PCs) using Intel x86 -compatible processors running Microsoft Windows. By

354-402: A bus type that would be open to all manufacturers, as fast as or faster than IBM's Microchannel, and yet still retain backward compatibility with ISA. This was the crucial turning point: the industry as a whole was no longer content to let IBM make all the major decisions about technical direction. In the event, the new EISA bus was itself a commercial failure beyond the high end: By the time

413-681: A common patent policy under the banner of the WSC . However, the ITU-T definition should not necessarily be considered also applicable in ITU-R, ISO and IEC contexts, since the Common Patent Policy does not make any reference to "open standards" but rather only to "standards." In section 7 of its RFC 2026, the IETF classifies specifications that have been developed in a manner similar to that of

472-704: 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 do the New Zealand , South African and the Venezuelan governments. On the standard organisation side, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) ensures that its specifications can be implemented on

531-402: A data format which is made public, is thoroughly documented and neutral with regard to the technological tools needed to peruse the same data. The E-Government Interoperability Framework (e-GIF) defines open standard as royalty-free according to the following text: While a universally agreed definition of "open standards" is unlikely to be resolved in the near future, the e-GIF accepts that

590-606: A definition of "open standards" needs to recognise a continuum that ranges from closed to open, and encompasses varying degrees of "openness." To guide readers in this respect, the e-GIF endorses "open standards" that exhibit the following properties: The e-GIF performs the same function in e-government as the Road Code does on the highways. Driving would be excessively costly, inefficient, and ineffective if road rules had to be agreed each time one vehicle encountered another. The Portuguese Open Standards Law, adopted in 2011, demands

649-535: A definition of open standards, which also is used in pan-European software development projects. It states: The French Parliament approved a definition of "open standard" in its "Law for Confidence in the Digital Economy." The definition is (Article 4): A clear royalty-free stance and far reaching requirements case is the one for India's Government 4.1 Mandatory Characteristics An Identified Standard will qualify as an "Open Standard", if it meets

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708-619: A fork of GNU social. In January 2012, a W3C Community Group was opened to maintain and further develop the OStatus standard. However, this was eclipsed by the work of the W3C Federated Social Web Working Group, launched in July 2014. This working group focused on creating a newer standard, called ActivityPub , which expanded on the protocols and design used in pump.io , which has since been standardized as

767-605: A full, irrevocable and irreversible way to the Portuguese State; e) There are no restrictions to its implementation. A Law passed by the Spanish Parliament 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 (ANEXO Definiciones k): An open standard fulfills

826-501: A payment for every IBM-compatible machine the particular maker had ever made in the past. Many PC manufacturers signed up as PS/2 licensees. (Apricot, who had lost badly by persevering with their "better PC than IBM" strategy up until this time, was one of them, but there were many others.) Many others decided to hold off before committing themselves. Some major manufacturers, known as the Gang of Nine , decided to group together and decide on

885-781: A policy of insisting on per-processor royalties, thus making competing operating systems unattractive to computer manufacturers and provoking regulatory scrutiny from the European Commission and US authorities, leading to an undertaking by Microsoft to cease such practices. However, the integration of DOS into Windows 95 was the masterstroke: not only were the other operating system vendors frozen out, Microsoft could now require computer manufacturers to comply with its demands on pain of higher prices (as when it required IBM to stop actively marketing OS/2 or else pay more than twice as much for Windows 95 as its competitor Compaq) or by withholding "Designed for Windows 95" endorsement (which

944-518: A second source supplier under license from Intel. Intel and Microsoft had enormous revenues, Compaq and many other makers between them made far more machines than IBM, but the power to decide the shape of the personal computer rested firmly in IBM's hands. In 1987, IBM introduced the PS/2 computer line. Although the open architecture of the PC and its successors had been a great success for them, and they were

1003-598: A set of principles which have contributed to the exponential growth of the Internet and related technologies. The "OpenStand Principles" define open standards and establish the building blocks for innovation. Standards developed using the OpenStand principles are developed through an open, participatory process, support interoperability, foster global competition, are voluntarily adopted on a global level and serve as building blocks for products and services targeted to meet

1062-491: A similar application itself forked from StatusNet. Following the first official release of GNU Social, a number of microblogging sites running StatusNet and Free Social began to transition to it to receive new updates to the software. But frustrations with the technology underpinning GNU Social and its complexity led a number of new server packages that aimed to be compatible with GNU Social using OStatus to shift focus to ActivityPub , including Mastodon , Pleroma and postActiv,

1121-459: A soft marketing voice and a big financial stick was effective: Windows became the de facto standard . For the competing computer manufacturers, large or small, the only common factors to provide joint technical leadership were operating software from Microsoft, and CPUs from Intel. Over the following years, both firms in the Wintel partnership would attempt to extend their monopolies. Intel made

1180-406: A subset of the possible techniques as practicable (so as to be able to run on any hardware that ran CP/M), with a major part of the market now all using the same exact hardware (or a very similar clone of it) it was practical to take advantage of any and every hardware-specific feature offered by the IBM. Independent BIOS companies like Award , Chips and Technologies , and Phoenix began to market

1239-598: A successful major push into the motherboard and chipset markets—becoming the largest motherboard manufacturer in the world and, at one stage, almost the only chipset manufacturer—but badly fumbled its attempt to move into the graphics chip market, and (from 1991) faced sharp competition in its core CPU territory from AMD , Cyrix , VIA and Transmeta . Microsoft fared better. In 1990, Microsoft had two competitors in its core market (Digital Research and IBM), Intel had none. By 1996, Intel had two competitors in its core market (CPUs), while Microsoft had none. Microsoft had pursued

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1298-543: A successor to OStatus. Open standard The terms open and standard have a wide range of meanings associated with their usage. There are a number of definitions of open standards which emphasize different aspects of openness, including the openness of the resulting specification, the openness of the drafting process, and the ownership of rights in the standard. The term "standard" is sometimes restricted to technologies approved by formalized committees that are open to participation by all interested parties and operate on

1357-714: Is determined by the market. The ITU-T is a standards development organization (SDO) that is one of the three sectors of the International Telecommunication 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: The ITU-T , ITU-R , ISO , and IEC have harmonized on

1416-557: Is here meant in the sense of fulfilling the following requirements: The Network Centric Operations Industry Consortium (NCOIC) defines open standard as the following: Specifications for hardware and/or software that are publicly available implying that multiple vendors can compete directly based on the features and performance of their products. It also implies that the existing open system can be removed and replaced with that of another vendor with minimal effort and without major interruption. The Danish government has attempted to make

1475-740: Is investing in Linux , and Microsoft ported Windows 8 to the ARM architecture with Windows RT . In the strictest sense, "Wintel" refers only to computers that run Windows on an Intel processor. However, Wintel is now commonly used to refer to a system running a modern Microsoft operating system on any modern x86 -compatible CPU, manufactured by either Intel or AMD. That is because the PC applications that can run on an x86 Intel processor usually can run on an x86 AMD processor too. In mid-October 2017, Microsoft announced that Windows 10 on Qualcomm Snapdragon

1534-464: Is still the dominant desktop and laptop computer architecture. There have been opinions that Microsoft Windows by its natural software bloat has eaten up much of the "hardware progress" that Intel processors gave to the "Wintel platform" via Moore's law . After the rise of smartphones and netbooks some media outlets have speculated predicting a possible end of Wintel dominance with more and more cheap devices employing other technologies. Intel

1593-451: Is the only one remaining on the market. Others (such as Digital , then the world's second-largest computer company, Hewlett-Packard, and Apricot ) concentrated on making similar but technically superior models. Other early market leaders (such as Tandy-Radio Shack or Texas Instruments) stayed with outdated architectures and proprietary operating systems for some time before belatedly realizing which way market trends were going and switching to

1652-506: Is then published in the form of RFC 6852 in January 2013. The European Union defined the term for use within its European Interoperability Framework for Pan-European eGovernment Services, Version 1.0 although it does not claim to be a universal definition for all European Union use and documentation. To reach interoperability in the context of pan-European eGovernment services, guidance needs to focus on open standards. The word "open"

1711-583: The CP/M-86 operating system, but these accidents were to have enormous significance in later years. Because the IBM PC was an IBM product with the IBM badge, personal computers became respectable. It became easier for a business to justify buying a microcomputer than it had been even a year or two before, and easiest of all to justify buying the IBM Personal Computer . Since the PC architecture

1770-759: The GSM phones (adopted as a government standard), Open Group which promotes UNIX , and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) which created the first standards of SMTP and TCP/IP. Buyers tend to prefer open standards which they believe offer them cheaper products and more choice for access due to network effects and increased competition between vendors. 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 (if they can be obtained at all) under restrictive contract terms from

1829-611: The "Simplified BSD License" as stated in the IETF Trust Legal Provisions and Copyright FAQ based on RFC 5377. In August 2012, the IETF combined with the W3C and IEEE to launch OpenStand and to publish The Modern Paradigm for Standards. This captures "the effective and efficient standardization processes that have made the Internet and Web the premiere platforms for innovation and borderless commerce". The declaration

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1888-510: The 32-bit optimized Pentium Pro and Microsoft's delivery of an unexpectedly high proportion of 16-bit code in Windows 95. Both firms talk with one another's competitors from time to time, most notably with Microsoft's close relationship with AMD and the development of Windows XP Professional x64 Edition utilizing AMD-designed 64-bit extensions to the x86 architecture, and Intel's decision to sell its processors to Apple Inc. The Wintel platform

1947-495: The IETF and ITU-T explicitly refer to their standards as "open standards", while the others refer only to producing "standards". The IETF and ITU-T use definitions of "open standard" that allow "reasonable and non-discriminatory" patent licensing fee requirements. There are those in the open-source software community who hold that an "open standard" is only open if it can be freely adopted, implemented and extended. While open standards or architectures are considered non-proprietary in

2006-518: The IETF itself as being "open standards," and lists the standards produced by ANSI , ISO , IEEE , and ITU-T as examples. As the IETF standardization processes and IPR policies have the characteristics listed above by ITU-T, the IETF standards fulfill the ITU-T definition of "open standards." However, the IETF has not adopted a specific definition of "open standard"; both RFC 2026 and the IETF's mission statement (RFC 3935) talks about "open process," but RFC 2026 does not define "open standard" except for

2065-433: The agile business". In 1981, IBM entered the microcomputer market. The IBM PC was created by a small subdivision of the firm. It was unusual for an IBM product because it was largely sourced from outside component suppliers and was intended to run third-party operating systems and software. IBM published the technical specifications and schematics of the PC, which allowed third-party companies to produce compatible hardware,

2124-445: The best-selling personal computer in the world and at least two of the next-best sellers were, for practical purposes, identical. For the software industry, the effect was profound. First, it meant that it was rational to write for the IBM PC and its clones as a high priority, and port versions for less common systems at leisure. Second (and even more importantly), when a software writer in pre-IBM days had to be careful to use as plain

2183-468: The biggest single manufacturer, most of the market was buying faster and cheaper IBM-compatible machines made by other firms. The PS/2s remained software compatible, but the hardware was quite different. It introduced the technically superior Micro Channel architecture bus for higher speed communication within the system, but failed to maintain the open AT bus (later called the ISA bus ), which meant that none of

2242-625: The computer industry. IBM would belatedly amend the PS/2 series with the PS/ValuePoint line, which tracked the features of the emerging ad hoc platform. At around this same time, the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, Microsoft's Windows operating environment started to become popular, and Microsoft's competitor Digital Research started to recover a share of the DOS press and DOS market with DR-DOS . IBM planned to replace DOS with

2301-484: The cost of implementing EISA was reduced to the extent that it would be implemented in most desktop PCs, the much cheaper VESA Local Bus had removed most of the need for it in desktop PCs (though it remained common in servers due to for example the possibility of data corruption on hard disk drives attached to VLB controllers), and Intel's PCI bus was just around the corner. But although very few EISA systems were sold, it had achieved its purpose: IBM no longer controlled

2360-649: The degree of openness will be taken into account when selecting an appropriate standard: The UK government 's definition of open standards applies to software interoperability, data and document formats. The criteria for open standards are published in the "Open Standards Principles" policy paper and are as follows. The Cabinet Office in the UK recommends that government departments specify requirements using open standards when undertaking procurement exercises in order to promote interoperability and re-use, and avoid technological lock-in. The Venezuelan Government approved

2419-603: The early 1980s, the chaos and incompatibility that was rife in the early microcomputer market had given way to a smaller number of de facto industry standards, including the S-100 bus expansion board, the CP/M operating system, the Apple II home computer, the use of the programming language Microsoft BASIC in read-only memory (ROM), and the 5 + 1 ⁄ 4 inch floppy drive storage medium. Firms competed fiercely to control

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2478-506: The following conditions: The South African Government approved a definition in the "Minimum Interoperability Operating Standards Handbook" (MIOS). For the purposes of the MIOS, a standard shall be considered open if it meets all of these criteria. There are standards which we are obliged to adopt for pragmatic reasons which do not necessarily fully conform to being open in all respects. In such cases, where an open standard does not yet exist,

2537-581: The following criteria: Italy has a general rule for the entire public sector dealing with Open Standards, although concentrating on data formats, in Art. 68 of the Code of the Digital Administration ( Codice dell'Amministrazione Digitale ) [applications must] allow representation of data under different formats, at least one being an open data format. [...] [it is defined] an open data format,

2596-459: The industry, and innovation in hardware and software was the rule. Microsoft Windows and Intel processors gained ascendance and their ongoing alliance gave them market dominance. Intel has claimed that this partnership has enabled the two companies to give customers the benefit of "a seemingly unending spiral of falling prices and rising performance". In addition, they claim a "history of innovation" and "a shared vision of flexible computing for

2655-411: The millions of existing add-in cards would function. In other words, the new IBM machines were not IBM-compatible. Further, IBM planned the PS/2 in such a way that for both technical and legal reasons it would be very difficult to clone. Instead, IBM offered to sell a PS/2 licence to anyone who could afford the royalty. They would not only require a royalty for every PS/2-compatible machine sold, but also

2714-409: The most successful long-term business strategy, which was to build a machine that duplicated the IBM PC as closely as possible and sell it for a slightly lower price, or with higher performance. Given the very conservative engineering of the early IBM personal computers and their higher than average prices, this was not a terribly difficult task at first, bar only the great technical challenge of crafting

2773-400: The needs of markets and consumers. This drives innovation which, in turn, contributes to the creation of new markets and the growth and expansion of existing markets. There are five, key OpenStand Principles, as outlined below: 1. Cooperation Respectful cooperation between standards organizations, whereby each respects the autonomy, integrity, processes, and intellectual property rules of

2832-547: The networking market (formerly the domain of Artisoft 's LANtastic and Novell 's NetWare ) with Windows NT , and the business application market (formerly led by Lotus and WordPerfect ) with Microsoft Office . Although Microsoft is by far the dominant player in the Wintel partnership now, Intel's continuing influence should not be underestimated. Intel and Microsoft, once the closest of partners, have operated at an uneasy distance from one another since their first major dispute, which had to do with Intel's heavy investment in

2891-411: The organization that owns the copyright on the specification. As such these specifications are not considered to be fully open . Joel West has argued that "open" standards are not black and white but have many different levels of "openness". A more open standard tends to occur when the knowledge of the technology becomes dispersed enough that competition is increased and others are able to start copying

2950-711: The others. 2. Adherence to Principles – Adherence to the five fundamental principles of standards development, namely 3. Collective Empowerment Commitment by affirming standards organizations and their participants to collective empowerment by striving for standards that: 4. Availability Standards specifications are made accessible to all for implementation and deployment. Affirming standards organizations have defined procedures to develop specifications that can be implemented under fair terms. Given market diversity, fair terms may vary from royalty-free to fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory terms (FRAND). 5. Voluntary Adoption Standards are voluntarily adopted and success

3009-647: The purpose of defining what documents IETF standards can link to. RFC 2026 belongs to a set of RFCs collectively known as BCP 9 (Best Common Practice, an IETF policy). RFC 2026 was later updated by BCP 78 and 79 (among others). As of 2011 BCP 78 is RFC 5378 (Rights Contributors Provide to the IETF Trust), and BCP 79 consists of RFC 3979 (Intellectual Property Rights in IETF Technology) and a clarification in RFC 4879. The changes are intended to be compatible with

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3068-485: The sense that the standard is either unowned or owned by a collective body, it can still be publicly shared and not tightly guarded. The typical example of "open source" that has become a standard is the personal computer originated by IBM and now referred to as Wintel , the combination of the Microsoft operating system and Intel microprocessor. There are three others that are most widely accepted as "open" which include

3127-476: The so-called open architecture . The IBM PC became one of the most successful computers of all time. The key feature of the IBM PC was that it had IBM's enormous public respect behind it. It was an accident of history that the IBM PC happened to have an Intel CPU (instead of the technically superior Motorola 68000 that had been tipped for it, or an IBM in-house design), and that it shipped with IBM PC DOS (a licensed version of Microsoft's MS-DOS ) rather than

3186-649: The technology as they implement it. This occurred with the Wintel architecture as others were able to start imitating the software. Less open standards exist when a particular firm has much power (not ownership) over the standard, which can occur when a firm's platform "wins" in standard setting or the market makes one platform most popular. On August 12, 2012, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Internet Society (ISOC), World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and Internet Architecture Board (IAB), jointly affirmed

3245-667: The use of Open Standards, and is applicable to sovereign entities, central public administration services (including decentralized services and public institutes), regional public administration services and the public sector. In it, Open Standards are defined thus: a) Its adoption is fruit off an open decision process accessible to all interested parties; b) The specifications document must have been freely published, allowing its copy, distribution and use without restrictions; c) The specifications document cannot cover undocumented actions of processes; d) The applicable intellectual property rights, including patents, have been made available in

3304-412: The vastly superior OS/2 (originally an IBM/Microsoft joint venture, and unlike the PS/2 hardware, highly backward compatible), but Microsoft preferred to push the industry in the direction of its own product, Windows. With IBM suffering its greatest ever public humiliation in the wake of the PS/2 disaster, massive financial losses, and a marked lack of company unity or direction, Microsoft's combination of

3363-457: Was first possible between servers running StatusNet , such as Status.net and Identi.ca , although Identi.ca later switched to pump.io . As of June 2013, a number of other microblogging applications and content management systems had announced that they intended to implement the standard. That same month, it was announced StatusNet would be merged into the GNU social project along with Free Social,

3422-454: Was regarded as an essential hardware marketing tool). Microsoft was also able to require that free publicity be given over to them by hardware makers. (For example, the Windows key advertising symbols on nearly all modern keyboards, or the strict license restrictions on what may or may not be displayed during system boot and on the Windows desktop.) Also, Microsoft was able to take over most of

3481-546: Was well documented in IBM's manuals, and PC DOS was designed to be similar to the earlier CP/M operating system, the PC soon had thousands of different third-party add-in cards and software packages available. This made the PC the preferred option for many, since the PC supported the hardware and software they needed. Industry competitors took one of several approaches to the changing market. Some (such as Apple , Amiga , Atari , and Acorn ) persevered with their independent and quite different systems. Of those systems, Apple's Mac

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