From wall sockets to file formats, our lives depend on shared rules that no one owns. LibreOffice's Italo Vignoli argues that open standards are not just technical details, but political commitments.
You arrive in a city you've never been to before. You're tired. You find your room, you open your suitcase, you take out a charger, and you plug it into the wall. The little green light comes on. You don't even think about it, because nothing serious happened. You've moved between two countries, two electrical grids, two regulatory regimes, and the machine in your hand just keeps running.
Behind this moment lies more than a century of meetings, disagreements, technical drawings, and compromises between people who will never meet you. The plug fits because someone, somewhere, decided it had to – and decided that that decision should be recorded, made public, and owned by no one. We almost never notice these things. We only notice them when something breaks: the adapter that doesn’t fit, the document that won’t open, the part that can’t be replaced. Standards are the infrastructure we live in, and like most infrastructure, they are invisible until they are no longer there.
The Public Agreement
A standard is a public agreement on how things should fit together. Two words in this sentence carry the weight: public and agreement. Public, because the rules are written down and anyone can read them. Agreement, because no one imposes them alone; they are negotiated between parties who accept that the common space is more valuable than any individual advantage within it.
This distinguishes a standard from two things with which it is often confused. It is not a law, because no state directly enforces it. And it is not a product, because no company owns it. A standard stands in a peculiar middle ground – it is something that belongs to everyone and no one, maintained by institutions whose sole duty is to keep it coherent and accessible. The metric system is a standard. So is the size of an A4 sheet of paper, the shape of a stop sign, the width of a railway track, the dimensions of a shipping container. None of these things were given. Each of them was once contested, and each of them was resolved not by conquest but by convention.
A Political Act, Not a Technical One
It's tempting to treat standards as an engineering issue. They're not. Or rather, they're just an engineering issue. The engineering is the easy part. The hard part is deciding that the rules of a shared space shouldn't belong to anyone. The measurement of the length, the width of a street, the voltage at an outlet should be shared and not owned by anyone.
The history of standards is, almost without exception, a story of fragmentation followed by painful unification. In the nineteenth century, European railways had dozens of incompatible gauges, because each company built its own. Goods had to be unloaded and reloaded at every border. The waste was enormous, and it was eventually resolved not because some engineers invented a better line, but because societies decided that the common good of interoperability was worth more than the private advantage of incompatibility. The same story is repeated with screw threads, with time zones, with paper sizes, with electrical systems. Each unification was a political act dressed in technical clothes.
When we say that a standard is public, we are saying something quite radical. We are saying that a certain class of rules – those that govern how we connect with each other – should be held outside the market, because if the market takes them away, it will be able to charge rent for a simple act of cooperation.
What do the Standards give us?
From the perspective of the person using them – that is, all of us, every day – open standards provide three things that are easy to take for granted until they disappear.
The first is the interchangeability. Because the rules are public, anyone can build according to them. If the light bulb you bought five years ago breaks, you can replace it with one from any manufacturer. If your supplier raises prices unreasonably, you can switch to someone else. If a company goes bankrupt, its customers will not be left out. You are not a prisoner of the choices you made in the past, because the choices were made in a public context, not a private one.
The second is the Continuity. What works today will still work tomorrow, and what was created yesterday will still work today. This is a nice gift, and perhaps a very important one. A public and stable standard means that your past will remain legible to you. The documents you wrote twenty years ago, the tools your grandfather used, the measurements recorded on an old building plan – all of these remain available, because the rules that govern them are still available. Continuity is the way a society speaks to itself over time. It is the way we stay connected to what we have and what has been done for us.
The third is the common ground. Standards allow people who have made different choices to work together. You and I don’t have to use the same brand, the same vendor, the same tool. We just need to agree on the interface between us. A standard is, in this sense, a kind of peace treaty – an acknowledgement that a common form of exchange matters more than the unevenness of preferences. It is the opposite of a monoculture. It is the treaty that makes multiplicity possible without chaos.
When Rules Become Private
Now consider what happens when the rules of a shared space are private.
Imagine that the thread on every screw in your country belonged to a single company and that using a screw required a license from that company. Imagine that the gauge of railway tracks was owned by one company and that every other operator had to pay to run trains on tracks they did not own. Imagine that the voltage of the electrical network was licensed and that sockets from any other manufacturer simply did not fit.
The three goods we just described will begin to erode. The interchangeability disappears, because you cannot replace one part with another without the owner's permission. The Continuity depends on the corporate survival of a single factor: if the company changes its terms, raises its prices, or goes bankrupt, you lose access not just to a product but to the entire class of things that depend on it. The common ground shrinks until it includes only the people who have paid for the same license as you. The collaboration it becomes a privilege granted by a third party, rather than a right that exists between equals.
This sounds absurd when we imagine it happening to physical infrastructure. We would never accept it for screws or rails or electricity. And yet, the history of standards is also the history of attempts to do just that, which some have resisted successfully in some areas and less successfully in others. The reason we have open standards for physical infrastructure is not that anyone thought they were obviously good. It's that societies have fought, sometimes for decades, to keep them out of private hands.
The Question of the Ancestors
There's a useful way to think about all of this. We should ask ourselves what kind of ancestors we want to be.
Every time we embrace an open standard, we win a small bet on behalf of people who don’t exist today. We say that what we build—the document, the product, the system—should remain accessible to them, even though we won’t be here to help them open it. We choose to be hospitable to a future we can’t see. And every time we embrace a closed standard, we do the opposite. We say that our successors will have to rely on the continued goodwill of a private entity to return to what we’ve built. We outsource their access to our own lives.
This is not a technical issue. It is a political issue, it is also an ethical one. Standards are the way a society decides whether its infrastructure should be owned or shared, whether its past should be accessible or licensed, whether its future should be open or closed. They look like engineering. In fact, they are a quiet, ongoing answer to the question of what we owe to each other and what we owe to those who come after us.
So the next time you plug something into a wall and it works – the next time a page prints cleanly, a part snaps into place without thinking – think for a moment about what had to be in place for that to happen. Think about who refused to own it. And ask yourself what kind of ancestor would allow you to be a closed model.
The article was originally published in LibreOffice/The Document Foundation website and republished with Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.
Although the press releases will range from very select to rare, I said I'd pass...because sometimes the editors hide.
