Our Work
Open Standards
Open Standards allow people to share all kinds of data freely and with perfect fidelity. They prevent lock-in and other artificial barriers to interoperability, and promote choice between vendors and technology solutions. FSFE's work on Open Standards has the goal of making sure that people find it easy to migrate to Free Software or between Free Software solutions.
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
- "Analysis on balance: Standardisation and
Patents"
by Georg Greve - Why FRAND is bad for Free Software
- "EIFv2: Tracking the loss of
interoperability"
by Karsten Gerloff and Hugo Roy - "Defending Open Standards:
FSFE refutes BSA's false claims to European Commission"
by Karsten Gerloff, Carlo Piana and Sam Tuke - FSFE's submission to the UK Open Standards Consultation 2012, held by the Cabinet Office.
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
FSFE responds to UK Open Standards Consultation
01 June 2012:
FSFE responds to UK Open Standards Consultation
01 June 2012:
FSFE: NW UK businesses please tell Government that Open Standards matter
28 May 2012:
Executive summary of the EURA case
09 May 2012:
State neglected web standards, company now faces EUR 5600 in fines
09 May 2012:
External links of interest
- Document Freedom Day
- ODF Alliance
- PDFreaders.org
- Play Ogg!
- "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
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