Taking Openness to the Next Level

Yesterday I wrote about one particular issue with standards: the fact that the associated patent licensing (if applicable) can shut out free software completely. But it's clear that the problems go much deeper: the entire standards-making process is conducted in a way that is often the antithesis of openness. That's not just bad for free software, it also means that the standards themselves suffer, as do many potential participants who are unable to contribute as fully as they otherwise might. Here's an interesting attempt to rectify many of those problems by drawing on the manifest success of the open source approach:

On Open Enterprise blog.