summary of Re: Beyond 'open standard'

Georg C. F. Greve greve at fsfeurope.org
Thu Jul 20 10:23:37 UTC 2006


 || On Wed, 19 Jul 2006 22:31:15 +0200
 || Jeroen Dekkers <jeroen at vrijschrift.org> wrote: 

 jd> An Open Standard isn't an oxymoron IHMO. You've got proprietary
 jd> standards like MP3 and de facto standards like MS Word.

You're missing my point, I think.

I know that these are referred to as standards by their vendors, but
ultimately what makes a standard a standard? To me it is the
availability for everyone to work and interoperate on the basis of
that standard independent of their competitors.

So even though people like to speak about "proprietary standards" or
"de-facto standards" for marketing purposes, I don't consider them
standards, at all.

In fact I would encourage everyone to speak about "proprietary
formats" and/or "proprietary interfaces" in such cases.

Regards,
Georg

-- 
Georg C. F. Greve                                 <greve at fsfeurope.org>
Free Software Foundation Europe	                 (http://fsfeurope.org)
Join the Fellowship and protect your freedom!     (http://www.fsfe.org)
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