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Report / Study | Publication

Standards and Open Source: Bringing them together

The aim of this EU-funded report is to analyse the collaboration models between Standards Development Organisations (SDOs) and Cloud Open Source software development initiatives, propose practical ways to further strengthen their interaction and to develop a roadmap of actions to improve the integration of open source communities in the standard setting process.

Cover page of report

European Commission

Cover page of report

Cloud computing and Open Source Software (OSS) are two phenomena that have changed the IT landscape in the last 10 or more years in ways that have substantially altered how software and IT solutions are produced and consumed. Both cloud computing and Open Source have a close, and sometimes challenging, intersection with standardisation and standards developing organizations (SDOs). Against these market dynamics, the European Commission committed in ICT standardisation priorities for the Digital Single Market (COM (2016) 176 final) to support further use of Open Source elements by better integrating OSS communities into standard setting processes of SDOs.

The aim of this report is to analyse the collaboration models between SDOs and Cloud Open Source software development initiatives, propose practical ways to further strengthen their collaboration and to develop a roadmap of actions to improve the integration of open source communities in the standard setting process.

The report provides an overview of activities initiated by SDOs on open source software. The mapping shows that for SDOs the collaboration with OSS communities may have different forms and address different aspects. First, some SDOs consider their collaboration with OSS communities as simple exchanges of methodologies; they are looking at understanding the ways of working and integrating Open Source mechanisms into standardisation. Second, SDO communities look at Open Source as a mechanism to provide implementations – often referred to as reference implementations – of a specific standard or standards based architecture. Third, some argue that the collaboration should go a step further. For them, the collaboration should be in both directions, and should imply that OSS communities participate in the creation of standards that takes place in SDOs or transfer their results to SDOs for further formalisation.

Considering this, three recommendations are provided for SDOs and OSS communities in order to build bridges between standardisation and open source:

  1.  SDOs and OSS communities should benefit from common actors that can establish channels of communication, joint activities and partnerships.
  2. SDOs can introduce methodological changes in order to make their development process similar or adopt additional processes which are similar to the ones used by OSS communities.
  3. OSS communities should increase their involvement is the standards setting processes.

Based on the findings of this report, a model, called the Platform Design Model, is proposed as a formalisation of the few successful examples of interaction between standard bodies, industry, and open source communities.

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Standards and Open Source Bringing them together
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