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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.

The Danish government has attempted to make a definition of open standards, which also is used in pan-European software development projects. It states:

  • The costs for the use of the standard are low.

  • The standard has been published.

  • The standard is adopted on the basis of an open decision-making procedure.

  • The intellectual property rights to the standard are vested in a not-for-profit organisation, which operates a completely free access policy.

  • There are no constraints on the re-use of the standard.




EXAMPLES OF OPEN STANDARDS

System:
  • GSM (a mobile communications system specified by 3GPP )


Hardware:
  • ISA (a specification by IBM for plug-in boards to IBM-architecture PCs, later standardized by the IEEE)

  • PCI (a specification by Intel Corporation for plug-in boards to IBM-architecture PCs)

  • AGP (a specification by Intel Corporation for plug-in boards to IBM-architecture PCs)


Software:
  • HTML / XHTML (specifications of the W3C for structured hyperlinked document formatting)

  • SQL (a specification approved by ANSI and ISO , with multiple generations of design and additional less official variants)

  • IP (a specification of the IETF for transmitting packets of data on a network - specifically, IETF RFC 791)

  • TCP (a specification of the IETF for implementing streams of data on top of IP - specifically, IETF RFC 793)

  • PDF/X (a specification by Adobe Systems Incorporated for formatted documents, later approved by ISO as ISO 15930-1:2001 {Link without Title} )

  • OpenDocument (a specification by OASIS for office documents)



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 Standard s. Bruce Perens and others have argued that the use of Patent s 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.


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