A question was posed to me recently concerning exactly what I meant when I talked about open standards, and how they differed from open source. In reviewing some of my previous postings, one of the things that I realized was that while I had offered up a number of definitions in passing, there really wasn’t any single, stock answer that I or others had seen for what exactly open standards mean. Moreover, a lot of people tend to look at open standards with a somewhat jaundiced eye, as if it was simply one more marketing label in a field that is already way oversaturated with marketing buzzwords – they didn’t understand why open standards were important, or they didn’t understand the distinction between open source and open standards.
Link: Understanding XML
