rants
Random rants and thoughts about my activities in and for the Free Software community.
Beyond ‘open standards’
I am dealing with a paper about standards and Free Software and I’ve found out that the term ‘open standard’ is a very common term in literature (and commercial advertising). According to most of the definitions I found, an ‘open standard’ can be patented and, at best, subject to RAND licensing policies. This translate into ‘open standard _can_ be impossible to implement in Free Software’.
Now, since I am summarizing in this paper what defines a standard that is implementable in Free Software, it would be nice to propose also a term that is non controversial like ‘open standard’.
Free standard is not good: I don’t think it’s savvy to replicate the fight between ‘open’ and ‘free’. A friend whispered ‘non discriminatory standard’ but he agrees that the negation at the beginning is less than optimal. I couldn’t think of any more solutions, so I ask here two questions:
1) does it make sense to introduce in the Free Software community a new term that is non-controversial and more precise than the generic ‘open standard’?
2) if yes, what would that term be?
Any suggestion appreciated. Please comment here or on the list Discussion where I posted this same message and I will summarize any useful result.