As you consider moving to open standard gaming protocols, it may be useful to view open standards in a larger context. Here are links to a couple short blogs and an interview that talk about what open standards are and are not, and how they can impact both the producers and consumers of technology. Enjoy.

Open source vs. open standards  

… open standards are the most critical, because making a choice today shouldn’t preclude you from making a different choice tomorrow.

That’s what open standards are all about. They’re documents that outline agreed-upon conventions to enable different programs to work together, along with some means to ensure that they actually do — a process or set of tests. With open standards, your company can pick and choose among competing vendors and not be locked in to any one of them.

Defining open standards

Open standards are developed in accountable and transparent processes that are open to all stakeholders; open to multiple implementation paradigms including open source; and standards text is available at no cost to all interested parties. Open standards, as a fundamental building block of innovation, become widely implemented because they are supported by all major stakeholders.

- Trond Arne Undheim, Director, Standards Strategy and Policy — EMEA, Oracle

Open vs. Closed: Why open standards matter

It does take a long time to develop open standards. But that standardization process pays off very quickly. Developing a typical web page now is much quicker if you do it to those standards than it was during the dark days of the last Browser War, when you had to develop parallel code bases for IE and Netscape, or choose one of them and lock out people who used the other browser.

- Bruce Lawson, Web Evangelist, Opera