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… Read the rest of this entry »