Open standard

An open standard is a standard that is publicly available and has various rights to use associated with it, and may also have various properties of how it was designed (e.g. open process).

The terms " open" and " standard" have a wide range of meanings associated with their usage. The term " open" is usually restricted to royalty-free technologies while the term " standard" is sometimes restricted to technologies approved by formalized committees that are open to participation by all interested parties and operate on a consensus basis.

The definitions of the term " open standard" used by academics, the European Union and some of its member governments or parliaments such as Denmark, France, and Spain preclude open standards requiring fees for use, as do the New Zealand and the Venezuelan governments. On the standard organization side, the World Wide Web (W3C) ensures that its specifications can be implemented on a Royalty-Free (RF) basis.

Many definitions of the term " standard" permit patent holders to impose " reasonable and non-discriminatory" royalty fees and other licensing terms on users of the standard. For example, the rules for standards published by the major internationally recognized standards bodies such as the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force), ISO (International Organization for Standardization), IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission), and ITU-T (International Telecommunications Union) permit their standards to contain specifications whose implementation will require payment of patent licensing fees. Among these organizations, only the IETF and ITU-T explicitly refer to their standards as " open standards", while the others refer only to producing " standards". The IETF and ITU-T use definitions of " open standard" that allow " reasonable and non-discriminatory" patent licensing fee requirements, but in practice most are royalty free.

The term " open standard" is sometimes coupled with " open source" with the idea that a standard is not truly open if it does not have a complete free/open source reference implementation available. Open standards which specify formats are sometimes referred to as open formats.

Many specifications that are sometimes referred to as standards are proprietary and only available under restrictive contract terms (if they can be obtained at all) from the organization that owns the copyright on the specification. As such these specifications are not considered to be fully Open.