Open Standards and Open Source: Characterisation and Typologies

Abstract

Open standards and open source have become essential for ICT markets from an innovation, business, technical, and policy approach. Openness is one of the core values in standardisation settings. When it comes to the definition of ‘open’, some views have pointed to a ‘clear-cut’ division between open and close standards. Rather than a pure binary approach this paper holds that the openness of a standard is a matter of degree, and moreover, that openness should be referred to three different dimensions: innovation; standardisation and intellectual property exploitation. This paper sets a taxonomy of the different existing typologies of ICT standards and aims to evaluate their degree of openness in each of these dimensions. The main objective is to propose a framework for assessing the openness of ICT standards - which might be useful to understand and analyse the competitive and innovative dynamics of each type of open standards.