What is an Open Standard and is h264 truly open?

[danns]

Yeah, I'm a little late here on this having only just started listening to Episode 142. I am hearing you guys thrown around that h246 is an open standard but I challenge this statement. To do so though, we have to step back and define what an open standard is.

From what I understand and Open Standard is technology that is fully documented and published and able to be implemented and distributed without restriction. But yet it seems as time goes on the definition of Open Standard has been corrupted to include technologies that while having a openly published specification, come with distribution or implementation restrictions/licensing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_standard

So what definition do we use? Is a standard truly open if it comes with restrictions? If we say no then how can we call h264 an open standard? Use and distribution of h264 technologies is restricted by the MpegLA and requires a license for many implementations of the technology.

I disagree that h264 is an open standard. It's a published standard, that it is, but by no means open.

Keep up the great work.

[ShawnJGoff]

"Open standard" describes the standard as an entity by itself: it does not describe the thing the standard is defining. More concretely, the standard is the body of text defining whatever is being standardized. There are standards that are not open - you have to pay money to get the standard itself.

We can adopt a different term for things which have been standardized and are open ("standardized-open"?). Another option is that we can simply talk about whatever the standard is describing as being open or not. H.264 and WebM are formats: one open, one not, so we can say WebM is an open format and H.264 is not.

[danns]

Ok so what you are saying is that an Open Standard is defined as "A standard that is accessible without restriction to the public." Thus the term should not have any other restrictions or privileges levied against to. To refer to h264 as an Open Standard is not to refer to the technology of h264 as an Open Standard but the standard describing the h264 technology in detail as the Open Standard.

When Steve Jobs stands up and says h264 is an Open Standard what he means is not that the implementation of the standard falls under the definition of commonly associated with Openness but that the Standard detailing the technology is itself Open. There for the term Open Standard has nothing to do at all with regards to implementation of the standard or rights/restrictions there of.

This sounds close to the ITU-T Definition of Open Standard which seems to have pre-existed the concept as an Open Standard being akin to what you coined Standardized-Open. Thus we could say that it was the members of the FLOSS community like Bruce Perens who corrupted the term Open Standard to suit their concept of what Open means.

What appears to be the problem here is that the term Open Standard has become too polluted from it's original definition and now no one is sure what one another is talking about. This confusion results in mis-understanding and purposeful mis-marketing so as to appeal to certain segments in co-opting a "buzzword" to seemly describe a feature or technology as open implying incorrectly that it subscribes to Openness of implementation but is really just Open to understanding.

[ShawnJGoff]

Agreed on all accounts.