In the globally integrated economy, open technical standards are deemed integral to enabling the delivery of everything from disaster relief services and health care, to business services and consumer entertainment. IBM said that such standards enable governments to create economic development platforms and deliver services to their citizens.
The tenets of IBM’s new policy are to begin or end participation in standards bodies based on the quality and openness of their processes, membership rules, and intellectual property policies; and to encourage emerging and developed economies to both adopt open global standards and to participate in the creation of those standards.
The tenets of IBM’s new policy also include advance governance rules within standards bodies that ensure technology decisions, votes, and dispute resolutions are made fairly by independent participants and protected from undue influence; and collaboration with standards bodies and developer communities to ensure that open software interoperability standards are freely available and implementable.
IBM’s new policy seeks to encourage the creation of clear, simple and consistent intellectual property policies for standards organizations, thereby enabling standards developers and implementers to make informed technical and business decisions.
Bob Sutor, vice president of open source and standards at IBM, said: Common, open and consensus-based technology standards from reputable standards bodies help ensure that each of us can easily purchase and interchangeably use computing technology from multiple vendors. The ways in which they are created and adopted provide reasonable assurances that disparate products will work with one another, and withstand the test of time.
