The ultimate purpose of an open standard is to increase the market for a technology by having potential consumers or suppliers of that technology to spend in it without having to either pay monopoly rent or fear litigation on trade secret, copyright, patent, or trademark causes of action. No such standard can properly be described as “open” except to the extent it achieves these goals. The industry has learned by previous experiences that the only software-related standards to fully meet these goals are those which not only permit but encourage open-source implementations. Open-source implementations are a quality and honesty check for any open standard that might be applied in software; whether an application programming interface, a hardware interface, a file format, a communication protocol, a specification of user interactions, or any other form of data interchange and program control. To support industry participants (suppliers, consumers, and regulators) identify and specify standards that permit open source implementations, the OSI has specified a minimal Open Standards Requirement (OSR). The OSI has also made a set of Criteria that can be used to judge whether a standard fully abides with that Requirement.

(Source:Opensource.org)