Freedom to Leave

7/1/2006

Simon Phipps's Freedom to Leave is a great discussion of standards and interoperability that gets to the heart of the debate about openness. And he gets it right.

He talks about how open standards and interoperability make it possible for people to try new things and for developers to come up with new innovations. He comes up with four criteria (paraphrased here):

No legal restrictions
Multiple independent implementations
No favorites
A least one open-source implementation

His "Freedom to Leave" is an excellent example of some of the advantages of openness. I hope some of the people backing proprietary software read it and start to understand what we are ranting about.

Via Tim Bray

Tags: standard

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