In the tech world, an open technical standard is a list of rules and guidelines and instructions for making or doing something consistently over time, that is accessible and practical, in the sense that all those rules and instructions and such are available to anyone who wants to use them, and importantly, in the sense that it has an open license, which means anyone or any entity like a business

can use it without paying a license fee, in addition to it being extensible and non-discriminatory

in terms of how they can be used and who can use them. So a standard is something like a JPEG,

which is an open file standard for a lossy image format, which can dramatically reduce the file size of computerized images,

and which will work the same way on all devices,

because it is standardized.

While a lightning connector,

the kind you'll be familiar with if you have an iPhone or older model iPad,

is a proprietary standard owned by Apple.

So other companies can use this standard,

but they have to get Apple's permission and pay Apple a licensing fee to do so.

Apple rules the roost with the proprietary Lightning Cable standard,

whereas anyone can make sure their apps play well with JPEGs for free because it's an open standard.

Other open non-licensed standards you might be familiar with include Bluetooth, MP3s,

though the MP3 was patented before it was made open and then consequently became popular.

GIFs, HTML, and the internet more broadly, plain text file formats,

markdown, ePubs, PDFs, which is another type of open standard that was proprietary, but then

eventually went open, zip files, and a slew of other bits and bobs, including those that allow

us to use ATMs in other countries.

Plug our devices into just about any outlet we might encounter.

And as I alluded to earlier, connect pretty much everything to everything else through the internet

and a slew of other wireless protocols, which are accessed and used in different ways by countless devices that adhere to standards that allow all that invisible wizardry to function together.

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