What are open standards and why are they important for networking?

Open standards let products from different vendors interoperate, which drives competition and innovation; they are developed by vendor-neutral, non-profit organizations.

An open standard is a publicly available, agreed-upon specification that any vendor may implement without permission or licensing fees. That openness is what lets the Internet be built from equipment made by thousands of different companies. It drives three things:

• Interoperability - A switch from one vendor talks to a router from another because both implement the same published spec.
• Competition - Many vendors can build compatible products, so buyers aren't locked into one supplier (which keeps prices down).
• Innovation - New technology can build on existing standards instead of reinventing the base.

The reason this works is who writes the standards: bodies that are vendor-neutral and non-profit, set up specifically to develop and promote open standards rather than favour any one company.

Examples of such organizations: IEEE, IANA, IETF, ICANN, ITU, TIA.

Contrast: a proprietary protocol (e.g. legacy AppleTalk) is controlled by one company — interoperability then depends on that company's goodwill, which is why proprietary suites largely lost to open TCP/IP.

Go deeper:

• Open standard — definitions, openness criteria, and examples (HTML, TCP/IP, USB).
• Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) — a vendor-neutral body and how its open, consensus process works.