Specifications for hardware and software that are developed by a standards organization
or a consortium involved in supporting a standard. Available to the public for developing compliant products, open standards
imply that an existing component in a system can be replaced with that of another vendor.
In contrast, a "proprietary standard" is a de facto standard from one organization that has become popular.
A de facto standard may be open to the extent its owner allows it. {def. answers.com}
An Open Standard is more than just a specification. The principles behind the standard, and the practice of offering and
operating the standard, are what make the standard Open. Working with software based on Open Standards frees us from the
hassles of a particular proprietary format.
'Open Standards' is rapidly spreading across the planet and shall become the de facto standard in software design.
The State of Massachusetts is migrating to open-standard software for all government documents (PDF/XML formats)
to avoid the legal hassles of proprietary software.
Adobe's PDF (Portable Document Format) and W3C's XML (Extensible Markup Language) are both considered to be open-standard formats
and are supported natively within OS X. Graphics and Text data can be easily saved in PDF. In fact, Apple's 2D modeling
engine ‘Quartz’ implements a superset of the PDF 1.4 specification. XML is used natively to store applications' property lists.
Mac OS X also natively supports Microsoft's RTF (Rich Text Format) which means that any text with embedded images can
be saved in RTF and hence, read by MS Word.
Apple's Safari Web Browser and Dashboard Widgets share common open-standard technologies via Webkit's Open Source Project.
Refers to software that is created by a development community rather than a single vendor.
Typically programmed by volunteers from many organizations, the source code of open source software is free and available to
anyone who would like to use it or modify it for their own purposes. This allows an organization to add a feature itself rather than
hope that the vendor of a proprietary product will implement its suggestion in a subsequent release.
Not Necessarily Free
Although open source software is technically free, many companies sell a distribution version of an open source operating system or
application for a fee. The distribution combines the free source code along with proprietary development utilities and a technical
support package. For example, the Linux operating system, the most widely known open source project, is available from several
vendors for a fee.
Although most all operating environments have open source projects, open source is particularly common in the Unix/Linux/Java world;
for example, the Apache Web server, sendmail mail server and JBoss application server. The Netscape Web browser was also turned into
open source in 1998 and later released as the Mozilla browser for Windows, Linux and Mac (see Mozilla).
I use the open-source and free
GNU Compiler Collection gcc version 4+ to develop OS X code.
