Many definitions exist, notably the one contained in the European Interoperability Framework (EIF) (note 1) published by the IDABC unit of the European Commission. Most important are the key principles of an Open Standard:

• Openness and Independence of its maintenance The standard should be adopted and maintained by a recognised independent organisation which openly and transparently further develops the standard, with access open to all. Key here that, if as is likely the standard will have been developed at least in part by industry then it is handed over in its entirety, with no lingering doubts on independence or influence.

• Retains no proprietary dependencies or extensions The standard must be free of any proprietary extensions or dependencies, or any other proprietary code or formats which might limit the use of that standard. Is the code really independent?

• Openly Available The standard is published in full and is freely available, with no legal or technical constraints on use or reuse by any party.

• Royalty free If a patent is present then this is irrevocably made available on a royalty free basis, and no royalty bearing licenses are required. This therefore specifically excludes RAND ( Reasonable and Non Discriminatory) licensing other than RF RAND (Royalty free version). The term RAND is highly contentious since to many it is exactly the opposite of that. How do you define reasonable when addressing a global market with substantial differences in local GDP? And it does discriminate against for example the FS/OSS licensing. The key requirement for this principal is that it must freely allow all business models.

• Multiple Implementations Do implementations of the standard exist in more than one product in general release by more than one supplier? Tests in practice all points above and also their effectiveness.

As part of Certified Open®, OpenForum Europe and Free Software Foundation Europe have constructed the following phrase to tightly encompass these principles:

An Open Standard refers to a format or protocol that is:

a) subject to full public assessment and use without constraints in a manner equally available to all parties;

b) without any components or extensions that have dependencies on formats or protocols that do not meet the definition of an Open Standard themselves;

c) free from legal or technical clauses that limit its utilisation by any party or in any business model;

d) managed and further developed independently of any single vendor in a process open to the equal participation of competitors and third parties;

e) available in multiple complete implementations by competing vendors, or as a complete implementation equally available to all parties.