I agree with the majority of the premises in "Open Season" (AW&ST June 27, p. 60). Open architectures are mostly a good thing. Much of my career was as a Software engineer in technologies defined by industry Standards. The standards-driven model usually does deliver better results to customers than a narrowly proprietary approach, but caution is warranted. We must ask: Who owns it? Vendors usually control a standards-based — market. Such technologies are actually proprietary, it's just that consortiums rather than individual companies control them. If the consor-tium consists of for-proflt hardware/ Software vendors, customers may get to enjoy "innovation" that's a better fit for those vendors' marketing objec-tives than for their own needs.
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