OpenISO.org

OpenISO.org Criteria for Acceptance as an Open Standard

The following this of criteria is excerpted from the Draft OpenISO.org Core Guidelines document, and will be updated when OpenISO.org's guidelines are clarified or otherwise updated. It is to be expected that significant work on clarifying OpenISO.org's criteria will the done during the OpenISO.org Review of OOXML.

Openness requirements include that there should be no patent issues etc, and that the process by means of which the specification is maintained is "open" in the sense that all legitimate concerns and commercial interests are fairly considered.
Maturity requirements include that a complete non-copyleft or weak-copyleft free software implementation should exist, and that the spec has been reviewed for cross-cultural applicability and with regard to its impact on people with disabilities. Where a significantly earlier standard with significant marketplace adoption already exists, the OpenISO.org maturity requirements also include that for any new standard which will compete with the pre-existing standard, for every aspect of how the new proposed standard which can be objectively compared with the pre-existing standard, the new proposed standard should in that respect be at least as good as the pre-existing standard.
The requirements for mapping properties are that all semantics which can be expressed by earlier standards in the same subject area (which fulfil OpenISO.org's requirements for approval as a standard) should also be possible to be expressed by means of the new proposed standard. The part of the new proposed standard which describes the features providing these mapping properties may be declared "optional" so that it is not a requirement for conforming implementations to implement these features, but the specification of these features should fulfil the OpenISO.org maturity requirements.

If disagreements exist regarding how this list of requirements should be interpreted and applied to particular standards and proposals, and the attempt to resolve the disagreement by means of fact-oriented discussion has failed, according to the OpenISO.org draft guidelines the conflict should be resolved by means of an independent fact-oriented review of the issue from a fact-oriented perspective. As long as OpenISO.org has not yet been formally established, this process will be organized by the OpenISO.org founder if someone makes the required financial resouces for this available. In cases where no-one is willing to cover the costs of an independent expert review to resolve a disagreement, the OpenISO.org founder will make the decisions himself as well as he can based on the arguments which have been provided.