Imagining a world without open standards

Andrew Josey at The Open Group explains why open standards are critical for interoperability and innovation

 

It’s not controversial to say that the world runs on open standards of one kind or another. We interact with them every day, whether that’s through boiling a kettle (electrical voltage standards first appeared in the early 20^th century), reading a PDF document (a format made open by Adobe® in 2008), accessing the World Wide Web (an open standard managed by the W3C® since 1994), or indeed holding a piece of US letter format paper (an ANSI® standard) or A4 paper (an international standard paper size since 1975).

 

In the physical world as in the digital world, we rely on clearly understood and openly shared standards to make the many elements of our lives work together. They are particularly important, however, in the digital world, where the enormous complexity of computer technology – and the expectation that those technologies will interact safely and predictably with each other – makes standardization essential.

 

The surprisingly brief history of open standards

In essence, the world needs standards to solve business problems. The process behind gathering a set of standards together for the benefit of both users and vendors makes solutions more applicable and more approachable for implementation.

 

The Single UNIX® Specification is a prime example of an open standard, but it did not start out that way. It was not so long ago that there were many different UNIX operating systems based on the original AT&T code base; the emergence of many variants being a common phenomenon when a technology first appears and is in its innovative and formative stage.

 

First developed at Bell Laboratories starting in 1969, UNIX technology was widely adopted by businesses in the late 1970s to make use of the more powerful and affordable computing systems coming onto the market.

 

This led to versions of the UNIX system being tailored to different purposes by different vendors – and sometimes becoming mutually incompatible in the process. Those differences created unnecessary hurdles in sharing information and applications between systems.

 

To unify the UNIX community, several companies came together to acknowledge the value of the UNIX platform and, more importantly, the need for all UNIX technology implementations to be interoperable and compatible to support the tremendous ecosystem built on top of UNIX systems.

 

An open and inclusive collaboration followed, which led to the creation of the Single UNIX Specification, the industry standard for UNIX systems. Since 1994, the Single UNIX Specification has been held in trust for the industry by The Open Group as the agreed set of API definitions for the UNIX system.

 

Today, The Open Group collaborates closely with the UNIX community in its efforts to maintain and evolve the standard. This involves allowing the standard documentation to be reused in open source projects, delivering test tools, ensuring that the standard documentation is freely available on the web, and managing the UNIX and POSIX™ certification programs.

 

The enduring future of open standards

More than a quarter of a century on from the creation of the Single UNIX Specification, it’s worth reminding ourselves of the importance of open standards to the industry, how far we’ve come in making the systems we rely on interoperable, and how much further we still have to go.

 

It seems that there’s no better validation for the success and power of standards than what we’ve seen with the UNIX system over the past 28 years. The UNIX platform demonstrates the value of being open, since as a truly open standard it allows us all to focus on driving innovation of the ecosystem around the platform rather than competing at the core OS level.

 

The open standard makes portability easier for software developers, provides integrators with choice in the building blocks for solutions, and enables customers to focus on solving business problems rather than integration issues.

 

Open standards eliminate the need for organizations to expend energy wrangling with competitors on defining how systems should work, giving them the space and time to focus on building and improving how those systems actually do work.

 

The real benefits, though, are downstream of vendors: open standards mean that businesses can effectively communicate and collaborate both internally and with peers. They mean that the expertise built up by a professional in one market or business can be taken with them wherever they want to work. They mean that a lack of knowledge resources is not the barrier that prevents businesses from making the move towards better, more efficient ways of working.

 

In imagining a world without open standards, then, the image is one of businesses constantly having to navigate between the walled gardens of different technology vendors, reskilling and rehiring as they do so, before they can even begin the serious work of delivering value from that technology.

 

It’s a situation we should never have to face – and as the world becomes more complex, and business more challenging to navigate, it’s something that becomes even more important to avoid.

 

For example, The Open Group is now more than just the custodian of the UNIX platform. Among the projects overseen by The Open Group are the Open Process Automation™ Forum, which is developing a common platform for businesses to automate manufacturing, and the Open Footprint™ Forum, which is developing a universal approach to measuring and analyzing environmental data like emissions.

 

In other words, as we tackle the future’s major challenges, like AI and climate change, the open standards community will be at the forefront of collaboration for innovation.

 

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Andrew Josey is VP Standards and Certification at The Open Group

 

Main image courtesy of iStockPhoto.com