Thursday, September 01, 2005

Open Standards and Open Source

The terms 'Open Standards' and 'Open Source' are regularly used in press and in conversation.

Unfortunately, on many occassions (esp conferences) the terms are miscontrued and lead to certain amount of confusion.

"Open Standard" refers to a uniform technical specification. Offcourse this refers to the process of development of the spcification as well.

TCP/IP, VoIP, SIP, XHTML, XML are all Open Standards, created jointly by various commercial, governmant and not-for-profit organizations under standards bodies like IETF, W3C etc.

However, Open Standards can have both proprietary and Open Source implementations.

"Open Source" refers to a software development and licensing model.

FreeBSD, FireFox (Mozilla), Apache web server, MySQL database server are some of the examples of Open Source software.