Open Up To Open Standards

April 11, 2013:  
As we foray in to 2013 and beyond, we see the emergence of everything open (open source, open standards, open courses, open data, open innovation and open spectrum). The IEEE Standards Association along with World Wide Consortium (W3C) is taking steps to meet these challenges by jumpstarting a series of seminars, conferences and workshops on “Open Future Series”. While the verdict is yet to be out, there is already a widespread acceptance from the industry on the following openness.

Open source software

First, the Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) movement that is founded on the idea that the open development of software is more effective than its proprietary alternative and advocated strongly by the likes of Richard Stallman with the start of the GNU project in 1983. Put simply, it is about access to source code and freedom to modify and distribute it. Though FLOSS had limited success in the PC era, thanks to the strong network externalities of Microsoft Windows, it has gained considerable traction in the mobile operating system platform with the launch of Android by Google.