 Welcome everyone. We thought we'd do a talk today about some research we've done recently around open standards and what various opinions are out there. And so I'm Mike Dolan from the Linux Foundation. I work on a lot of our new project initiatives that we spin up. I also work on our legal work and I work very closely with Jory who's our vice president of standards. And we are here to talk about open standards. What does that mean? There's a lot of different opinions out there. There's a lot of open source reports, state of open source, state of open, all kinds of reports out there about open source and what it means. But when you get to open standards, not so much. There's a few things here and there over the past few decades, but it's not consistent or it's just there's not a lot of it. We also see there's a number of definitions for open standards. Here I just copied and pasted in one from the open source initiative who has published in open standards definition. Some like it, some don't. Similar to the open source definition, it's hard to fit on one slide. Some people take issue with certain aspects of it. It can be a little bit challenging to think of which standards actually meet the definition and I'm not sure I see some in the audience involved in OSI who might be able to tell me if this is working out as planned, but I won't point fingers. I like simple definitions. There's a simple one from IBM. My bias is to be transparent. I worked there for 10 years. We did a number of things in open source and open standards, but one of the things I did appreciate is that we had a pretty concise view of it and I share this as one other opinion that's out there. It's certainly not definitive, but at the end of the day, if it's freely available for adoption, implementation and updates, I think that pretty much captures a lot of the essence of what people are looking for when they think of an open standard, but it's hard to tell. Do others agree with that or not? I'm not sure. When we look at open standards, we tend to see a lot of options, a lot of optionality, different ways of approaching standardization. You have different intentions. You have different levels of access or requirements around access. You have different intellectual property structures around how you develop a standard and you have different participation engagement models. We see closed standards. We see open standards. There's this continuum in the middle and it's not very clear to us exactly what is open standard versus not open standard. I use closed standard here. Sometimes there's proprietary standards, other terms for these things, but there is some sort of continuum. It's the intention just to support one company's ecosystem, which is a fine business goal. You can be a proprietary standard creator as a company and people have to adopt your standard to plug into your ecosystem. That's a good business model for some companies. Some have made trillions of dollars off of that, but there's other standards that have a different intention. The intention may be that everybody in the world uses a standard and connects through some layer like the internet and there you need a much different type of standard. One company's standard isn't going to work for everybody and so your intentionality may be different. The access levels, who gets access to the standard? Both to contribute to the standard, to use the standard, the intellectual property structure. Do you have to agree to one company's IP terms? Is there some sort of membership structure for a new entity that has a different intellectual property policy that all members agree to? Is it something that is under a RAND terms where there's probably going to be some sort of royalty payment requirement at some point? Or is it more of a RAND royalty free model which may require you to enter an agreement for a license, but it will at least be royalty free? There's also participation differences. You may have a partner feedback program or something if it's a proprietary standard, you don't get an option to go change the standard to provide feedback or changes to it. But there's other options. Most standards organizations today that we think of have member requirements. Many don't. Many are open to anybody to participate and we tend to associate many of those with the sort of open standards model. But we do see, I took one project that I'm aware of that we are working with a lot and mapped it out. What does it look like? And there's different options at different levels. It's not consistently one column or one way of doing things. Each standards organization has developed a model that works for them. Sometimes it's more open in certain aspects than others, but there may also be reasons for that. You may have antagonists in the ecosystem that you don't want cooking in the kitchen with you as you're building a standard. There may be other things that require you to sort of protect what you're trying to do in the open with a moat and maybe some of these access or participation or even the IP terms are a way for you to create that moat to keep bad actors out. And there's different outcomes of this. There's some people who consider anything that's not a proprietary closed standard that one company controls, everything is open standards beyond that. So the moment you allow any other companies to participate or anybody to participate, it's now an open standard at some level. So, but there's different outcomes of that. You have the O-RAN Alliance, for example, which in the telecommunications industry has been opening up in their words, the RAN stack. And you may agree with what they're doing or not, but they essentially have a fair reasonable nondescribinatory IP model, which is not generally what the open source ecosystem really generally gravitates towards. Now they've also set up an O-RAN source code community, which is actually separate from the O-RAN Alliance, and that one actually develops open source software in an Apache 2 license. But it's a different model. It's one where in terms of what telecommunications for the RAN have been, this is more open than what they've been traditionally doing. At the same time, if you're gonna build a standard for containers that you expect every cloud provider in the world to adopt and to use and to propagate, you have to maybe do something a little bit differently. Whereas telco is a very limited set of users, the moment you get out into the broader set of cloud users and providers and developers, you need something a little bit more open. That's where open container initiative comes into play. It has a different intention. It has an access that's available to anybody on GitHub. The intellectual property terms are defined in that you have an Apache 2 license on contributions from the contributors, but you also have an open web foundation 1.0 patent only agreement that all the members agree to at the point that those releases are done. And the participation, again, wide open versus one that may be a little bit more closed for other reasons. So what we wanna do is reach out again, do a study in the age of post COVID worlds and say, what do people think open standards means? What is open standards in terms of others' perceptions? What do they value as part of the open standards ecosystem or process? What do they think about the different strategies around this and what can we learn as an organization that helps bring up and pull together standards communities? What can we learn from this and ultimately take forward? So with that, I'll turn it over to Jory. Yeah, so we also really wanted to tackle this from a practitioner's perspective. So together with some really awesome partners and I wanna thank all of them, but also ECMA International in particular, because they've really helped field this survey to a wide variety of people who are participating in the development of standards and also consuming and implementing standards. So we will be releasing this report really soon. We'd hope to have it done in time for this, but we're very busy people. So anticipating this in the next couple of weeks, I hope. And we'll get this done. And we're keen to maybe evolve this as well into something that we see more annually. Again, because we think that we can learn a lot from surveying practitioners on a regular basis. So we will also make the data available as soon as the report goes live. Looking a little bit at the demographics, which is obviously really important, we had a total start of just over almost 1,100 total people starting to take that survey, 496 valid respondents after we cleaned the data for qualified responses and that sort of things based on that screening criteria. We ended up working with third panel provider to make sure, again, that we're just getting an unbiased set of respondents to the survey and to ensure a lot of balance in terms of demographics, which you can kind of see here. I'm pretty proud of this actually from the standpoint of it being our first survey. We were able to kind of balance out across North America, APAC, Europe, a pretty even balance across organization size and then also by industry and whether these are folks producing technology as a core business or whether they're consumers. So we'll have, again, more info on the breakdown of the demographics in the final report. But we wanna share some of the select key findings today and I say select, because we'll say some of this for the report, gotta have something newsworthy, right? Involvement in standards, especially open standards is really widespread. That's probably not, may or may not be surprising to you. We talk a lot about within the LF adoption of open source but I thought it was worth calling out that 91% of the organizations that we surveyed said that they are involved in open standards. We'll kind of, this may be hard to see and so I do apologize for that. 74% said that they were involved in non-public standards. This demonstrates really that organizations recognize the benefits of standards participation. They recognize that there are benefits in ensuring that their products and services are really compatible and policy compliant. I think it also indicates that they're not just adopting an open source only technology strategy, they're really leaning on both. So just a good result to see here. Another key takeaway was that organizations widely prefer open standards and to the rate of seven times more than other standards. So this was pretty cool to see across many of the segmentations that we did organization type, region, size and role within the company, vast preference for open standards. The small organizations showed the most preference or the strongest preference for open standards compared to others but as you can see it's pretty big gap across the board. Geographically the regions also clearly showed a preference for open standards. North America more so but then also other regions as well. So again kind of reinforces that despite political differences between these regions there's a great preference for open standards. Yes, Jeff? So we didn't have qualitative like text fields so we have to assess based on just like the responses. In the survey report we kind of go into like why that might have been. We did get a lot of responses from participants who said my organization largely does earn revenues from patent royalties and so we have some guesses that we can make based on those responses that there's probably a contingency of respondents who are participating in this field from a standpoint of revenue generation. So we also wanted to know what's the value over time that you see, right? And we saw that people were responding that open standards deliver stable or increasing value over the last three years. We asked how has that value increased over time and 64% of organizations in our survey reported that that definitely increased it. Only 5% of organizations indicated that the value derived from the open standards decreased and 32% indicated that it remained unchanged. So overwhelmingly 95% of organizations state that the value derived from open standards either remains constant or it's increasing. So I think this is a strategy that orgs generally are seeing increases in value over time and thus a strong bet. 72% of organizations say their customers prefer products and services based on open standards. They are listening to what their customers want and reporting that open standards are the way to go. Rand and RF standards both factored into IP strategies as reported by our survey respondents. One thing that we really didn't get into with the survey was really testing theories about licensing strategy and so on. We just wanted to know what the preferences were and what their experience was. So we would kind of set that to the side. We don't test that theory. But it was notable that 73% of organizations did agree that the advantages of open standards explicitly outweighed any patent or royalty opportunities compared to 8% who disagreed with that statement. So really interesting finding there. Open standards increase competitive and innovation. 80% of orgs state that open standards promote competition in the marketplace. Many of you work at orgs that are concerned about timing the market. And that is a very hard thing to do. Open standards do provide a compelling strategy kind of like compound interest rates, early competitive benefits that you find can kind of build and accelerate over time. And so it was a really cool finding to see that the orgs found competitiveness in the short term and the long term and innovation in the short term and the long term. They felt open standards provided the benefits there. 80% of orgs say that the increased use of open standards will make them more competitive. So again, kind of building on that pro-competitive nature of open standards. Increasing involvement in open standards drives some strategical and tactical improvements for organizations. And we asked orgs then why they should increase their adoption of open standards. 76% of organizations said that increased use of open standards would make them more innovative. So more, you know, innovative over time. And the number one reason was that open standards would improve productivity for that work. So I thought that was a very interesting finding as well. So here's a little bit of a breakdown of why respondents felt their organization should increase the adoption of open standards within their org. So you see improving productivity, becoming more innovative, avoiding vendor lock-in, which is another common reason why people choose open standards. And, you know, that was very much worth calling out. On the security front, open standards contribute to hard and soft benefits. And one of those things is security. 77% of organizations say increasing their use of open standards will improve cybersecurity. Certainly in today's environment, that's top of mind. And it's worth calling out that they felt that from a security posture standpoint, that was a strong benefit. So again, improvement to security, improving the overall quality of the open standards that organizations use. It's not just about and being part of a production process of a standard, but also consumption. When you're implementing it, you learn a lot about, you know, how well it serves you. If there are gaps, if there are problems, you then can contribute back. And that is seen as a big benefit to an open standard. Then there's other soft benefits as well that were noted like being a more attractive place to work, improving the firm's reputation, and so on. So we did look at the segmentation. And I regret that I don't know those numbers for you, but we do have a breakdown in our report on the appendix, where we take a look at like, was there a difference in org size and a difference or a difference in region or things like that. Where there was something that was really notable, we did try and call it out here. But for the most part, I was really surprised at how consistent these perceptions were across size and region, so great question. All right, so 64% of organizations say that open standards delivered increasing value over the past three years. I think that might actually be a duplicate, but the point is over time, the value of open standard seems to increase for orgs. And I think, you know, we have some great examples of that, the internet. The World Wide Web Protocol being one, that's 30 years of royalty free this last week. So, again, like compounding interest, these benefits can be, you just increase over time. Another finding we gleaned from the report was that it's easier to participate in the development of open standards according to our survey respondents. We asked how easy is it to participate from personal experience? You know, I've had groups I've worked with that have been very easy to participate in, some that are less so, but by and large, open standards got the nod to non-open standards. Bottom line summary from the report, investment in standardization as an activity, as a organizational tech strategy, remains really strong and really complementary to open source. We found that firms were in fact continuing to participate, continuing to invest in standards, and that's very meaningful. We've also found that open standards have eclipsed closed standards in driving innovation, value, and competition, and that's certainly from the real and perceived benefit standpoint across a lot of segmentation. And then also that open standards provide transformative benefits and increasing value for organizations over time. So again, your investment in an open standards project today is gonna reap a return for you in time. So why does this matter? That's a great question. Why does it matter to do this research? Royalty-free standards face new and existing threats. Challenges like unfamiliarity with the importance of universal reciprocity, the new EU-IPO-SEP regulations. We have key participants in the process which are juggling business models based on royalty-generating, sorry. Oh, sure, EU is European, IPO is their patent office, SEP is standards essential patent. Brife with acronyms, the standards world. So yeah, so key participants that are juggling large royalty-generating patent portfolios. It's something to manage with and around. And then also shifting awareness about the value and benefits of open standards, especially with new generations of participants coming in just as with open source, we have to kind of continuously build awareness for open-source licenses and practices and development models and so on and so forth. And the open standards world needs this as well. So very important. Probably most like the why, the real why, is that if we're going to solve the world's like most pressing important problems, we need to be able to innovate safely together. And here I'm talking about like climate change and sustainability and energy management and all of that sort of thing that's not going to be solved by any one firm or any one really creative genius like Elon. It's gonna be something that we have to work together to do. And so how can we use what we learned through the survey? Well, I think this means helping our projects and our organizations start to better draw on or fully adopt open processes and procedures in order to maximize the chances for success for that effort, right? We all wanna see the work that we do together succeed. Acting on opportunities to bring in new contributors, bring in more folks, collect feedback, act on that feedback to improvise and ease onboarding and implementation, make it easier for people to give that feedback and safe. And then also thinking holistically, are there ways that we can support or bolster the work that we do together through other programs like a conformance or certification process or policy or things like that? Are there other programs that we can use to achieve success for our standards projects? So that is a super rapid fire review of the key takeaways from our report. We did wanna make sure to make space for questions and so we will build those now. Yeah, that's a great question. So the question is, which took longer? We did ask for the perception, which takes longer. And that was so close, they were very much equal. I, my assumption was that people would report that open standards would be faster, but the finding was really not, there was no substantial difference, so, yes. Standard that may be open. I'll repeat the question. Does this involve just software standards? Or are you looking at all kinds of standards like hardware standards such as USB-C? So the framing was ICT standards, which does include software, but could and also include hardware protocols as well. Technology standards, it was the scope of the survey. We didn't look at things like building standards, for example. Projects that we host that are like risk five as an ISA. It's more or less a standard. There's a number of things that also border hardware, software, it's just in the general technology space. Well, as the lawyer would say, I am not your lawyer. Certainly we can't provide legal advice, but I think there's different approaches. I spent a lot of time at a very large company who was one of the largest partners in the world for many decades. And what we did is we patented certain areas of technology and then there were certain areas that we decided we were going to work on in an open model. And at that point, we did not assert or create royalty license programs around those areas of IP. So there's a way that you can go about this intentionally. And then there's also some companies that we see it's a little bit maybe not as coordinated or intentional where certain business units may be wanting to gravitate towards an open standard for various reasons of market opportunity and things like that. We see a lot of open standards or more or less if you build it, all boats rise type of a model. But there's a number of companies who have other parts of their business, which their day-to-day goals and metrics are based on how much revenue they licensed out associated with their IP portfolios. And so those parts of the business may be conflicting in terms of their goals with other parts of the organization. And some companies have figured out a way to manage that process and be intentional about it. And some haven't. And I think that's where we see some of the challenges because some companies are a little bit scattered or depends on who you talk to, what answer you'll get in terms of what's going on. We see this a lot in some spaces where there has been historically a large standard essential patent licensing program established around certain standards. So when you start looking at mobile technologies and some of the core mobile standards, you're gonna see a lot of that. If you look at video codecs, you're gonna see a lot of that. What we'll see is some companies will fight the opportunity for open standards to even exist. We've seen that recently in some of the video codecs based for example. And so there's other ways of doing it though, instead of trying to squash it from ever happening, some companies are embracing it for certain parts of their future technology roadmap or product roadmap and then maybe reserving some aspects for their proprietary technologies. And so there's a lot of different approaches out there. I don't know which one each company will choose and I don't generally give them guidance other than they have to figure out what they want. And my general guidelines are be intentional about what you're doing. These sort of scatter shot haphazard will see what happens and let our business units fight it out. Generally doesn't go well in the long run. Steven. One better back analysis. Is it on? Oh, sorry. Was there some analysis done on the backside? When you say ICT standards, I had to learn the hard way that telco standards are different from infrastructure standards or different from things like the IETF and because of the way investment flows in those very different industries, IP practices flow differently. So to your point that some people get very fussy about standards but that's because the telco community, the mobile community does things dramatically different as an industry, not just the assholes about patents and so if there was any way to start to tease it apart afterwards, that would be really interesting data to see. I agree. I think we learned a lot putting this first survey together and I think that would be, I think in the future we might add some better questions to help us better do that back analysis. There's probably some that we could attempt but not enough that I would feel really confident making any key insights on that basis. So I think that would be a great improvement to a next survey, we'll see. Yeah, I think there's some interesting dynamics, especially at some newer spaces or newer segments that you may not consider would be a haven for some of the past mobile type of activities but if you look at for example, electric vehicle charging standards and some of the IEC standards that have even baked in software requirements into the standard where you have to use a copyrighted files from the IEC itself into an EV charger. The challenges associated with that to scale out a viable EV charging solution that actually is innovative and improving lives is a challenge and so you see some companies with proprietary standards or some others sort of leading the way on that front. I noticed on the collaborating organizations none were internationally recognized SDOs that I know of, it doesn't mean they aren't but the ones that I'm aware of weren't on the list. So there's also a tension between international recognized SDOs like W3C, IETF, I'll put ISO in brackets because they're not really open and how you can participate but is that tension addressed in this slash could it be addressed in future work because some people who like doing work in those international SDOs are annoyed at certain other organizations spinning up groups that do standards that they think of could be happening in their space. It's a politically charged question so maybe I'll take it. Yeah, I mean. Testing our diplomacy. It's not lost on us. Some of the newer efforts are challenging the status quo of some of the international organizations and I think my message has been we would love to evolve with them and help them on this and some are a little bit easier than others. Just like ISO IEC JTC-1 which is a collaboration between ISO and IEC is a much different engagement model than if you go to say one that is not open to more of what we do. JTC-1 for example, we are as Joint Development Foundation we are a publicly available specification entity so we can submit any of our standards through a PAS process with them to get approval. You can even then apply to have JTC-1 publish your publicly available specification and standard as a free one on ISO's website which is actually an extra process but can be done. And so there are some ways to figure it out but it's not obvious and it's very niche. So if you wanted to say for example publish an open standard for electric vehicle charging as I'll give you an example you may face a lot more pushback and them saying well in order to do this you must go through our standards process which is not as open as many people would like to see and has a different outcome and a different result and so I think there is a tension I think it will play out. I've got a front row seat to an electric vehicle charging situation right now so I'm using that example a few times but it is something where there's a traditional standards model that sees open source and open standards as an extension of open source and that may not be what they necessarily think is a value. And I think there's an ulterior conversation that we have to get into at some point and Jordan I've talked about this but if you look at how a country measures innovation most countries most economists measure innovation based on patents. Number of registrations is a particular metric and if we perpetuate that model indefinitely or we don't change that then we're going to be stuck with measuring innovation based on patents and as anybody in the open source world knows that's not necessarily a great measure of innovation from our perspective because we're doing a lot of innovating and we are not counted as any innovation in that metric. So that's another aspect of it where I've had very high level conversations with some of those organizations you're thinking of who aren't on that list and they're very openly talking about it in private at least that this is a challenge that they face. I think I would add to a lot of those like traditional SDOs that you kind of mentioned are trying to figure out what their strategy is and should be with open source and what a successful relationship between source code implementations and specs could be but it's just been maybe more of a challenge for that mode of development than it has been for a group of companies to come together and do something quickly because they have business objectives, they have things they need to do. And yeah. Yeah, to give an example, a jury is a guy three weeks ago, I was in Geneva with a conversation with an international standards organization you would recognize and leadership matters too. They've got new leadership in place and the new leadership sees that there's a different model and that there's a different way of doing things and they want to learn. And so we can't also just assume that because they were resistant to it in the past that they will be in the future. Sometimes it's about timing. It's about having the right people in the right place with the ability to do something about it. We play the long game. We're open, we're pretty transparent about what we're doing. We do play the long game. When you're ready, let us know. Let's talk. I think we may be at time. Yeah, 340 was our end time. We started a little late. I guess that's it. But Dylan and I are round off. It's actually 350. 350? Is it? Oh, I had 340. Is it 340? Oh, I'm sorry. We're over time. Yes. So thank you. Come find us and thanks for coming. Thanks. Thanks.