Open standards

The European commission in one of its reports (European Inter Operability Framework for Pan-European e-Government Services) has recommended open standards to attain interoperability in the context of pan-European services.

What is an open standard?

The European Commission (EC) has defined the term “open standards” as part of the final version 1.0 of the European Interoperability Framework.

The standard is adopted and will be maintained by a not-for-profit organisation, and its ongoing development occurs on the basis of an open decision-making procedure available to all interested parties (consensus or majority decision etc.).
The standard has been published and the standard specification document is available either freely or at a nominal charge. It must be permissible to all to copy, distribute and use it for no fee or at a nominal fee.
The intellectual property - i.e. patents possibly present - of (parts of) the standard is made irrevocably available on a royalty-free basis.
There are no constraints on the re-use of the standard.

(i) System:

(ii) 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).

(iii) 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);
OpenDocument (a specification by OASIS for office documents, approved by ISO as ISO/IEC 26300).