On August 29th, OpenStand celebrated its two-year anniversary. A week earlier, we reached out to supporters and the global open development community with a simple, three question survey, hoping to gather thoughts and insights about the present and future state of open standards and open development.We received solid response, which you can review here. In this post, we’ve highlighted select responses to our first question:
“How have open standards changed the world over the last 25 years?”
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“In technology development, open standards are the fundamental pillars for the worldwide economic growth and progression in all sectors of the economy.”
-German M Fajardo Muriel, OhmTel Ltda, Colombia
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“Open standards open markets to everyone. They support innovation and competition in the marketplace. They allow users to choose the best to fit their own needs. They are a boon to advancing technology to better the future of mankind.”
-Kenneth Martin, U.S.A.
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“Open Standards have allowed large and complex problems to be decomposed into smaller, more manageable pieces, so that solutions can created as a system of systems. Each component of the problem serves as a reusable part for the initial solution as well as for additional applications where the initial part was developed. Open Standards provide the means of defining the messages and transport mechanisms to allow for the larger system of systems to be built and maintained.”
-Lewis Collier, United States
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“Open standards are the substrate innovative ideas thrive on, where they can grow and develop based on their merits.”
-Damien, Australia
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“Voluntary standards have been critical to the development and global adoption of the Internet. Without open standards, the social and economic benefits that the Internet has brought to 3 billion people would have taken many more years to take place.”
-Russ, United States
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“Well, *without* open standards, the Internet as a whole would definitely have collapsed under the tremendous entropy created by the expansion of applications, network device roles, and different implementations. It is just amazing, given the end-to-end complexity, that it works so well, and that is due largely to the open standards. The whole process of developing and maintaining open standards has also helped to maintain the infrastructure and atmosphere for continued collaboration and cooperation between major technology and infrastructure providers over the years, as the Internet itself has increasingly become a venue for intense commercial competition.”
-Vicky Risk, Internet Systems Consortium, United States
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“We are making the web more accessible to persons that would not have had the opportunity to do so without open standards. The sense of community is fantastic, and we are seeing a large market share being taken up by these collaborative policies which is changing the way software is built and marketed.”
-Taelor, Careca Web, United Kingdom
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“1. To expand industry, 2. To expand Usage, 3. To encourage entrepreneurship, 4. To set a level playing field for economically weaker countries / companies to enter the market, 5. To unite the world.”
-Mukul Sinha, India
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“Better products and lower prices due to global competition, information available to everyone, global interoperability, faster innovation and transparent processes are some of the things that have entered our lives and made them better.”
-Anastasios Chatzithomaoglou, Forthnet, Greece
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“They have allowed progress to move more quickly. Otherwise we would have stove-piped systems that never inter-operate. Each one would require specialization and rampup, much of which might not be transferable to another manufacturer’s product. It would be an enormous waste of energy. Our productivity would be lower.”
-Lawrence Bressler, United States
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“It has made innovation possible outside large corporations and leveled the field for ‘honest’ competition.”
-George Refseth, Norway
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“During the last 25 years open standards have fueled computing and networking innovation, spawning the digital age as we know it today and an online market size estimated in the trillions of dollars, implemented almost exclusively with free software, created at a global scale by and for the community.”
-Dimitrios Bouras, Greece
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“Open standards were key to the development of the internet and to people being able to collaborate and work together to adopt them and more importantly to improve them. They evolved – unlike the closed ones of ITU etc (remember X.400).”
-Mitra Ardron, Lumeter Networks, United States
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“Access has reduced the excuse that reading and understanding the standard was difficult because of the cost of acquiring many standards. easy access always means more use.”
-Andy, Canada
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“Open standards allow people to excel together to create the best world possible. The resulting innovation and freedom for global good raises the potential for equality, education and life enhancement for all.”
-Janna Anderson, United States
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Many of these benefits are featured in our 10 Benefits of Open Standards Infographic, which is available for download or site embedding!