Standards /Open standards,the way forward in today’s Industries.
(by Lakshika Rajakaruna )
As the Language in speech for human, as names for objects and even as steps for performing a beautiful dance, Modern day industries and organizations follow standards in making the virtual order and discipline of collaboration. In its meaning in everyday use the word standard encompasses general ideas such as, a level of quality or attainment, or an Item or a specification against which all others may be measured. In more technical terms and usage, a standard is a framework of specifications that has been approved by a recognized organization, or is generally accepted and widely used throughout by the industry.
In today’s highly complex and competitive Industrial environments, relationships build up among companies and its customers, and also companies with other companies are highly crucial. Most of the time, for a customer to address their business needs, they have to depend on several companies which provides their required services and products. Similarly for a company to provide its services to customers, they might have to depend on other companies which provide the supplements in order to provide their service or build their product. With these requirements customers and companies tend follow what is now known as standards as the binding factor for relationships.
Standards have become extremely important due to the facts that they ensure and leverage quality, safety, reliability, efficiency and interoperability of products and services. Products from various vendors or different parties can work together giving the end user enough freedom to choose what is best for them. This way customers and end users can consider constrains on economy, localization and other resources to support their choice. Adhering to standards gives customers an assurance on what they get on the amount they pay for and always can complain if the product does not meet its standards.
This is more visible in IT industry as well as in any other. Standards allow customers to depend on different parties in providing Service Hardware and software. Without standards users will be confined to a single vendor to provide all their services. Internationally recognized standards have being developed in defining common interfaces for products and services to operate. Any changes or modifications in standards are carried out by common agreement of interested parties.
Not only companies in general, There can be internal/private standards within the company that can be beneficial in many ways. This leads to manufacture a product or provide service, consistent in quality and performance, and each customer get equally treated. For example, this could be following test specifications overtime, where all the products are equally qualified. Sometimes the customer may order a quantity of more than one from the same product and expect all of them to serve equally. If a single company makes more than one type of product, the customer may buy several types of products and may expect a high interoperability or ease of installation. Thus, companies following Standards Test Procedures help customers to be assured that all of the products which are delivered to them behave identically. In the same way the developer or the Manufacturer get other benefits such as, reduction of reported problems and less complexity in installing and integrating the products in customer’s environments.
Standard Setting Organizations (SSO).
For standards to be recognized widely, it should be approved by a recognized body of people, or in other words an organization. Standards setting organization is identified as an organization which its main obligation is to set standards, which are then widely used, become de factor standards. Such organization has emerged based on industry as well as national and regional requirements. An example for a national organization is the Sri Lanka Standard Institution (SLSI) which functions under the Sri Lankan government Ministry of Advanced Technology and National Enterprise Development and is governed by a Council appointed by the Minister. This has the authority and provides leadership in creating national standards for the countries requirements.
Being just a standard setting organization (SSO) is not enough to set standards that are internationally accepted. It should be an internationally recognized standards setting body. Such recognized International SSO found today are, International Organization for Standardization (ISO), International Electro-technical Commission (IEC) and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU).
Taking a look at how international standard setting organizations perform, Standards are initiated most of the time as a proposal from one or more members representing the organization. If there is adequate support for a certain proposal, a committee is appointed on drafting the new standards. The new proposal known as the “work item proposal” is then being evolved with certain Ideas under the consensus of the committee members with much deliberation, debate and voting. The draft is then release to the other members of the organization. If there are more requirements the draft is again sent back to the committee for further changes to go through the same evolution process.
Standards published by SSO in the above process can have many advantages in adopting. Since, it has come out from much formal consensus process. This includes all members in the SSO getting the chance to contribute in the development of standards, and there are inputs and consultation from experts in subject area. The main Idea depicted here is that everyone who is interested in the standard setting can participate in a natural and transparent process which is unbiased on particular groups.
The know disadvantages of such process is that. Standards get a long time to be published and come in use. By the time the standards are published, the popularity and the need might be degraded. Though the standard setting process tries to be transparent most of the time, particular groups or industry vendors may try to influence in indirect ways.
We see Organizations such as ISO trying to act on these issues by highly valuing the project management techniques on delivering products (here setting standards) under time constrains. Being pro-active, which are essentially looking ahead and making predictions on expected problems to stay out of them is another way. To eliminate unnecessary influences a careful selection of the members are done. ISO in this case, except only the participation of members of National standard bodies.
Open Standards.
If free and open source software (FOSS) for Software , Open standards would be for Standards. This does not mean that FOSS is Open Standards, but tends to share a meaning which most of the time miss understood or argued by many.
Some organizations were not happy in consumers interpreting Open standards as standards that may be copied, used and distributed for no fee; this including whose embedded technology is irrevocably available on a royalty-free basis. Thus, Open standards has been redefined by several Standard setting organizations.
American National Standard Institute has defined open standards as those standards that are developed by a process where there consensus by a group or “consensus body” that is open to representatives from all materially affected and interested parties, and there is consideration of and response to comments submitted by voting members of the relevant consensus body as well as by the public. There should also be broad base public review and comments on the draft standards. In addition , ANSI tries to balance the interests of the implementers and users of the standard with the parties who own the Intellectual property rights (IPR) that are essential to implement that standard by allowing the payment of reasonable license fees and /or other reasonable and non – discriminatory license terms that may be required by IPR holders.
International telegraph Union Telecommunication Standardization sector (ITU-T), Business Software Alliance (BSA) also follows similar elements as ANSI in open standards.
But, well known Open Source exponent Bruce Perence argues that open standards should follow the principles of availability for all to read and implement, and maximize end user choice where customer is not locked to particular vendor or group. In addition, there should be no royalty fee only when certified by standard organization may involve a fee, no discrimination on favoring one party over another for reasons other than technical standard compliance of vendor specifications. Standard extension and use of subset are allowed, but certification may be declined to certify them. And finally predatory practices prohibited by licensing terms.
The definition by Bruce Parlance is praised and widely excepted by the FOSS community, and not only so, standard organizations such as European interoperability Framework (EIF) affirms some key elements of Parance definition. Such as,
“The standard has been published and the standard specification document is available either freely or at a nominal charge. It must be permissible to all to copy , distribute and use for no fee or at a nominal fee”
“The Intellectual Property – I.e patents possibly present -of (parts of) the standard is made irrevocable on a royalty free basis. “
In general we can consider common characteristics of all these definitions of Open Standards such that , every one excepts that Open Standards to be easily accessible for all to read and use, developed in a process that is open and easy for anyone to participate and independent from any groups or vendors.
Open standard organizations.
With the dilemmas in definition of open standards listing down of Open standard organizations might be controversial. But some active organizations which are generally presumed to be Open which can be listed are the Internet Engineering Task Force(IETF),World Wide Web Consortium (W3C),Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers(IEEE),Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) and free standards group FSG. Many of these organizations have a great deal of account in standards being deployed or developed in IT industries which have been later adopted by SSO such as ISO as Open Standards.
There are many examples of such standards widely embraced by the Community. Some are development protocols like TCP/IP , SMTP created by IETF. HTTP developed by W3C together with IETF, HTML, XML, XSL and other web standards by W3C. Standards in this nature have greatly helped to expand the boundaries of interoperability in a mass scale. The most renowned example is the World Wide Web or the Internet. Internet would have never gained its ubiquitous presence, where it is accessible from many computing devices using different hardware and software platforms, without open standards implementations.
There are some standards which are quite popular in FOSS community but never had been adapted as a standard in Commercial world for example Open Document Format (ODF) by OASIS. ODF was never adopted as a document format by the Industry Giant Microsoft and never made their office suit MS office Open/read ODF files. Instead they maintained their own document format under their control, taking the advantage of the marketing strength they possess.
There are certain advantages using open standards for many reasons. As it was discussed earlier, Use of open standards prevents the consumer being locked to a particular service platform, technology or a vendor. Since , Open standard are available for all to read and use, the implementation of standards can be replace by end user’s choice. Though different parties use different technologies they will be able to communicate through open standards. This can further give opportunities to use FOSS in implementation. We have seen FOSS companies emerging which are competitive with large corporate giants, providing similar services for best cost and efficiency. For example WSO2 becoming the key player as an open source middle ware platform company originating from Sri Lanka and becoming popular globally for its competitive products outmatching of that of Oracle , IBM and Tibco.
Further, most governments these days look in for Open standards for better security and reliability. Imagine if a government had to totally rely on a foreign company for its Information and communication Technology requirements. That way all internal information would be only accessible through that particular vendor’s tools and technologies. This could end up in great risks of infringement in internal affairs if the countries lose their healthy relationships. This could be similar for governments as well as for any other company. What if your Technology gets old by time and Companies might fall or stop supporting old products. The ease of porting applications to different technologies and better protection of data over applications being obsolescent is inherited in adoption of open standards.
Moreover, Governments can encourage local companies in providing their services on open standards in countries lacking strength and abilities obtain services which are not locally available.
With much controversies and debates over patents, open standards tend to share the same controversial facts in the industry. Patents are assets of companies and a source of income. Patents define how strong company is. Companies possessing huge amounts of patents cannot be sued by other companies. Due to Software and Patterns implementations, one company might be implementing patters of another rival company in its software products.
Thus in adopting Open standards as an implementation, adopts patents used in developing the standards. Already some SSOs such as ANSI, IEEE, IETF, ISO/IEC and ITU expressly acknowledge the right of charging certain royalty and to place reasonable restrictions on reciprocity, sub licensing and license for essential technologies over open standards. Some argues that it limits the freedom of implementation.
This can be seen in the “Most Gigantic patient battle ever seen in the history “which happened very recently, where Oracle sues Google saying that Google’s mobile operating system Anadroid infringes java patents. This can be clearly seen as an aggression against the notion of Open standards. Java was made open standard Sun Microsystems before it was accrued by the renown database company Oracle and Oracle baked SSO like European Committee for Interoperable Systems (ECIS).Open Forum Europe (OFE) affirmed java to be open standard.
Conclusion.
This composition gives a brief analysis of advantages over incorporating standards in today’s industry mainly focusing on IT sector. Further, it elaborates on key aspects of open standards and its pros and cons.
Standards, born by consensus of interested and affected groups, can become widely accepted by the community. These standards are then managed by organizations formed by the human consent. Yet how standards are used, improved and implemented can greatly effect on companies and industries adopting them.
There are standards with wide acceptance which initiated through SSO like ISO and there are Standards which originated from Industry use, starting from a single company and later taken into consideration by SSO and developed as standards.
Whatever its origin, in an era where no single technology, group or a vendor can provide all requirements of service. Interoperability among diverse environments is required as never before. Thus adoptions of standards are in high demand in establishment of industries.
Open IT Standards can even be more of value when it comes to interoperability. Among other commercial standards, Open standards are freely (free as in freedom) available for reading and adoption. This gives the end user a much more reliability, quality, safety, efficiency and freedom in choosing implementation, whether it is from a particular vendor, free software product or local implementation by the user with the reduction of cost.
Technologies and patents attached to Standards can greatly damage the freedom of creativity and adoption of use. At the time of this writing, Two of the world’s software industry Giants (Oracle and Google) are in war with each other over the creation of wonderful product the Anadroid OS which became the most popular mobile OS in the world recently.
Open standards can be the way forward for mankind to overcome the barriers of technology and as the internet grew seamlessly by contribution of many , but can be a barrier itself when it comes to define ownership and authority malicious context.
References.
- Hoe, N & Quinn, P (2006) Free/Open Source Software Open Standards. India: United Nations Development Programme – Asia-Pasific Development information Programme.
- European Union,2004,European Interoperability Framework for Pan-European eGovernment Services [Brochure],Office for Official Publications of European Communities, Luxembourg
- International Organization for Standardization /International Electro technical Commission 2007 , How ISO/IEC Guides add value to international standards [Brochure], ISO/IEC, Switzerland
- International Organization for Standardization 2010, International standards and “private standards” [Brochure],ISO, Switzerland
- Sri Lanka Standards Institution (1984) Sri Lanka Standards Institution, Available: http://www.slsi.lk/about-us.php Last accessed: 21st September,
- About the IEC (2010) International Electrotechnical Commission, Available: http://www.iec.ch/ Last accessed: 21st September, 2010
- About ITU (2008) International Telecommunication Union, Available: http://www.itu.int/net/about/index.aspx Last accessed: 21st September, 2010
- ANSI new and Publications (2009) American National Standards institute, Available: http://www.ansi.org/news_publications/other_documents/other_doc.aspx?menuid=7#Definition Last accessed: 21st September, 2010
- Perens, B Bruce Perens Available: http://perens.com/ Last accessed 22nd September, 2010
- About WSO2 (2005) WSO2, Available: http://wso2.com/about/ Last accessed: 21nd September, 2010
