Open Standards and Open-Source Software

For different computers, programs, and devices — often made by different companies — to work together on a network, they must agree on common ways of doing things. This is the idea behind standards, and especially open standards.

What is a standard? A standard is an agreed, published set of rules or specifications that everyone can follow, so that products from different makers can work together (are compatible or interoperable). For example, common file formats and network protocols are standards.

Open standards versus proprietary standards.

• An open standard is a standard that is publicly available to everyone, free (or nearly free) to use, and not controlled by any single company. Because anyone may use it, products from many different vendors can work together. The Internet itself is built on open standards (such as TCP/IP and HTML), which is a major reason it works across every kind of computer.
• A proprietary (closed) standard is owned and controlled by one company, kept private, and often needs permission or payment to use. It can lock users into one company's products.

Advantages of open standards: they ensure interoperability (products from different makers work together), give users freedom of choice and avoid being locked to one vendor, are usually free, and last longer because they do not depend on one company's survival.

Common open standards and open file formats. Examples of open formats that are not tied to a single company include:

• HTML — the open standard for writing web pages.
• ODF (Open Document Format) — an open format for text documents and spreadsheets.
• PDF — a widely used open format for sharing documents that look the same everywhere.
• PNG for images, OGG for audio, and plain text (TXT) and CSV for data — all openly specified.

Unicode. Unicode is an important open standard for representing text. Earlier coding systems (such as ASCII) could represent only English letters and a limited set of characters. Unicode gives a unique code to every character of almost every language in the world, including Indian languages such as Odia and Hindi. This lets computers store and display text in many languages correctly, which is essential for our multilingual country. …