Cognition

There have been some great articles on the dangers of, either no standards, or closed standards. However, no one has really talked about how almost EVERYTHING we have accomplished as a race of people, has been to the credit of open standards of information exchange and interface. So let’s take a walk back through the ages, and look at the wonderful things that open standards have brought us.

1. Numbers

Regardless of the language they use, or even the character set they use for writing it, most countries on the planet now use the “decimal positional notation” for all numbers and mathematics. This public, open standard for notation has allowed the development of relatively friction-free international commerce, and was the successful basis for…

2. Weights and Measures

What if, every time you bought a gallon of milk, a five-cent license fee was paid to the owner of the patent – on the Gallon?

Aside from underpinning all advances in commerce, engineering, scientific research, cartography, medical sciences, etc… just look at a few of the many examples of what goes wrong when we don’t follow established and open standards of weight and measure.

3. The Telephone System (SS7)

Ubiquitous enough that most people don’t realize there’s a standard at work here, the details of the Signaling System Number Seven protocol are the magic glue that makes global and local telephony possible. It’s worth noting that individual countries are able to implement and revise this base standard in significant ways, and that they’ve done so without abandoning the SS7 system. (This would be a great example of an extensible standard).

When was the last time you plugged a telephone into a wall jack – anywhere in the world – and couldn’t get it to work?

Other non-technical, non-software standards:

1. Shoe Sizes
2. The Dewey Decimal System
3. ISBN
4. Bullet Calibres
5. Screw sizes and screw heads, bolt, nut and nail sizes – (although not ALL screw heads)
6. Dimensional lumber
7. K-12 Grades
8. Zip Codes

The most obvious technology standards are, of course, electrical power – of the 110V or 240V, 50 or 60Hz variety. Can you imagine what limits on the innovation of electrical equipment we would have suffered under if GE collected a license fee every time you used a wall jack?

Now here’s an interesting question – why has it taken so many years for “Hi-Def” television to become ubiquitous? The underlying standard (broadcast or cable television) wasn’t extensible and, in fact, (similar to the Y2K bug) had been designed with very short-sighted considerations.

In a level playing field, (such as the emergent technology market of Internet servers, databases, scripting languages, frameworks, etc) open source software is a sure contender. However, when dealing with vendor lock-in (which is ALWAYS based on closed and/or proprietary standards) it doesn’t have a hope. This is a simple (perhaps simplistic) explanation for the failure of Linux to make the gains in desktop market share that everyone has expected.

In the long run, adoption of the right open standards becomes the trojan horse within proprietary software. It levels the playing field – let the best app win.