Open Standards
Lock-in of data is one of the most common techniques to artificially raise the cost of migration to Free Software. Ensuring the best possible interoperability through Open Standards is essential in enabling users to escape vendor lock-in. FSFE's work on Open Standards has the goal of making sure that people do not have to lose all their data when migrating to Free Software.
Introduction
The relevance of Open Standards is closely linked to networking effects, and has consequently been rising dramatically. The reward for gaming the system for proprietary vendors is increasing, so is the cost for users of software.
Governments, public interest NGOs, including groups that are concerned about freedom of competition or consumer rights are generally strong proponents of Open Standards. Typical critics are the proprietary software vendors and those that represent their interests. One of the items that critics seek to highlight is the inherent conflict between innovation and standardisation.
Standardisation deliberately limits changes to a technological basis, including innovation. These limits are introduced in order to allow subsequent innovation by everyone that has access to the standard and not just the party that controls the technological basis. So standards limit the ability to innovate by a single party in order to allow innovation on the basis of that standard by multiple parties.
Open Standards allow such innovation by all parties with no leverage for the initial developer of the platform to limit such innovation or the competition it represents.
FSFE's goals include freedoms from lock-in, of innovation and competition for everyone. That is why FSFE is a strong supporter of Open Standards.
Publications
Publications at the IGF
- "Sovereign Software: Open Standards, Free Software, and the Internet"
FSFE contribution to the first IGF, by Georg Greve
Publications on MS-OOXML
- Six questions to national standardisation bodies
- FSFE Context Briefing: "Interoperability woes with MS-OOXML"
- FSFE Context Briefing: "DIS-29500: Deprecated before use?"
- Article on BBC: "Questions for Microsoft on open formats"
- Article on Heise.de: "The converter hoax"
Related News
- 2008-04-02: FSFE concerned about quality of standardisation process
- 2008-03-26: 26 March 2008: Today is Document Freedom Day
- 2008-03-26: German Federal Foreign Ministry honored for Open Standards work (in German)
- 2008-03-06: Petition calls for Open Standards in the European Parliament
- 2008-02-28: FSFE calls on Microsoft to release interoperability information without restrictions
- 2008-02-20: Introducing Document Freedom Day - 26 March: A global day for document liberation
- 2006-07-12: Commission to Microsoft: Preventing interoperability has a price
- 2006-04-27: Samba and FSFE: "Microsoft - obstacle to innovation in the digital society!"
External links of interest
- Document Freedom Day
- ODF Alliance
- "Open Documents and Democracy" by Laura de Nardis and Eric Tam, Yale Information Society Project
- "An Economic Basis for Open Standards" by Rishab A. Ghosh
- "An emerging understanding of Open Standards" by Georg Greve