Guest Blog: Don’t Confuse Open Source With Open Standards

Steve Nice, CTO at Reconnix, discusses the benefits Open Source infrastructure.

The European Commission has recently published guidelines which will make it easier for public authorities to switch to Open Standards. This move should be commended, but with a caveat. Open Standards do not equate to Open Source, and vendor lock-in is still a probability. In an effort to appeal to the public sector and other organisations that have fallen victim to proprietary system overspend; some of the large IT companies have publically embraced the idea of Open Standards, but with questionable motives.

Open Source software has its roots in the free software movement from the early '80s. The underlying premise to Open Source software is that all source code is made freely available to promote collaboration and interoperability. The movement began in opposition to the established proprietary software companies that essentially locked users into their often incompatible systems.