OSNews: The Importance of Software Standards

"In a local office somewhere near you, someone wants to send someone else a electronic document. Once there was a fairly broad agreement about the way such documents were prepared and delivered, before the advent of the computers and the Internet.

"Today there is also a fairly universal agreement about how such tasks are carried out, central to achieving this fairly common task is the ubiquitous Microsoft Word. With a form of Windows on virtually every corporate desktop, the pervasiveness of Word documents in business is understandable. MS Word and .doc may appear to be a standard way of doing business but are they a standard...?"

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• Consortium Standards Bulletin: The Balkanization of Standard Setting(Mar 27, 2004)
• Tectonic: Open Source vs. Open Standards(Mar 27, 2004)
• eWeek: Open Software, Secure Software(Feb 28, 2004)