Open standards create value. Not the exclusive sort of “value” which means blocking competitors from entering the market, but the inclusive sort, where anyone can benefit from the low barriers to entry and compete based on the quality of what they build using those standards. Of course, you already know this or at least I don’t need to explain it again, but sometimes ideas can be made more reusable (for inspiring other ideas) with the help of a good example. You could say that human memory itself is an open standard, in that the means for committing an idea to memory (at least temporarily) is well known: memory is automatic.
Let us remind ourselves, then, of some of the most significant open standards.
- HTTP over TCP/IP
- The standards which pretty much give us the Web and the Internet. Without them you wouldn’t be reading this right now. I’m not even going to try to explain how much of the world relies on the existence of these two standards, or try to imagine what the world would be like if they were closed standards.
- RSS
- While I prefer the [Atom] standard, [RSS] is similar and very popular. These web-based “feed” formats allow developers to easily write applications that access regularly updated sources of media, be it text, HTML, audio or video. It is also easy to write software which produces these feeds, without the producer having to worry about the presentation of the data at the other end. This gives subscribers greater choice.
- Xiph
- One of the biggest inconveniences on computers right now is the number of different, incompatible, closed media formats. Not only does this mean that many users need more than one media player, but that encoding is often beyond their reach, especially with the unnecessary financial burden and patent encumbrance of these formats. That is where Xiph comes in. Xiph is an organisation devoted to creating royalty-free open standards for digital media, most notably the lossy audio and video codecs [Vorbis] and [Theora] (respectively), and the [Ogg] media container format which can encapsulate them. Note, though, that despite the popularity of the Ogg container format, the fellow open standard of Matroska may be the better long-term bet.
- Creative Commons Attribution
- Given my previous comments about licences being a standards issue, I think that the Creative Commons group of licences can be considered popular standards these days. Moreover, Free licences being the nearest things to “open standard” licences, I think the Creative Commons Attribution (by) almost counts as an “open standard”. The question of whether it is Free depends on whether you believe the Debian’s view or the FSF’s view, but the forthcoming version 3.0 of that licence may have fixed any remaining problems. The same applies to the more copyleft Attibution-ShareAlike (by-sa) licence.
- UTC
- More and more, communication using the Internet, especially instant communication, reminds us that all humans exist on (or orbit above) a spherical ball which rotates on an axis such that different parts have an unoccluded view of the Sun at different times. Trying to use a universal, unamiguous frame of reference when the majority of people have solar-based sleep patterns and calendars becomes very difficult. The best attempt to solve this, and an international standard, is Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), which is based on a meridian which passes through Greenwich, UK, EU. A testament to its usefulness is that it is incorporated in other well-known standards.
Surely any combination of these would have to be the ultimate combination of standards? That is certainly what I felt when I found the Audio Wikinews page. There you can find an HTML table (and RSS feed) containing links to recent recordings (in Ogg Vorbis format) of news briefs and articles recorded by people reading from scripts based on the collaboratively edited (Creative Commons Attribution licensed) Wikinews wiki. The fact that some of the news readers do not even have English as their first language, but still produce wonderfully clear speech, makes it sound like an even more important project which people are foregoing their native tongue to contribute to. English cannot count as an open standard, though, because it is not a universal language selected by an international committee, unlike Ido.
When my Ido gets better, can I create http://io.wikinews.org/ ?
