Comments on: Open Standards are not enough to prevent lock in

By: Nodalities » Blog Archive » This Week’s Semantic Web

Nodalities » Blog Archive » This Week’s Semantic Web — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 17:48:53 +0000

[...] Open Standards are not enough to prevent lock in [...]

By: Ross Gardler

Ross Gardler — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 00:00:08 +0000

Kjetil,

I agree and have posted on many occasions on the topic of data lock-in with web2.0 services. However, in this instance I’m concerned about a different issue. In this scenario the data is in a truly open standard and is held on servers owned and managed by the data owner, yet there is still a potential for lock-in.

By: Kjetil Kjernsmo

Kjetil Kjernsmo — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 09:38:33 +0000

This has been a topic of my interest for some time. Facebook and Google has been hailed for building on open standards in many of their APIs and formats, using e.g. class attributes of HTML or Atom, JavaScript, etc, but this is not enough to prevent lock-in either. One reason is that the legal conditions that these APIs are under makes it pretty clear that they are not at all open standards, even though they are built on such. That’s actually pretty easy to fix, these things are so simple, it could easily be reproduced by a community.

More importantly, I think, is that the data is under locks, and so, any alternative use and implementation will be a second-class citizen, thus ensuring lock-in even though there are simple, open formats and APIs.

By: Simon Wardley

Simon Wardley — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 20:01:41 +0000

I absolutely agree with you.

This is especially true in the XaaS (X as a Service) world where open standards are not enough to ensure portability, you also need multiple providers of the same standard. The only way to ensure this is through open source as no provider will hand over strategic control of their business to another. I covered this in my OSCON 07, Web 2.0 SF and Berlin talks.

Anyway, open standards is not enough.