now.
Clearly, the latter is the most interesting idea. With this small example, we immediately get to the core of the use and benefit of standards: using a common language reduces the overall effort and cost and allows entities to communicate with each other.
An open standard is a standard that is publicly available, meaning that anyone is allowed to use it. This doesn’t necessarily imply that it is free: technology patents for which a fee has to be paid can still apply. Open standards are not usually controlled by a single group or vendor and don’t rely on specific technologies.
There are thousands of standards available today, each with a different purpose. For networking, such standards as TCP/IP, HTTP, HTML, SMTP, XML, etc will no doubt sound familiar. For images, standards like JPEG are widely used, and everyone knows the MP3 standard for