Article on organisational influences in software standards and their open source implementations

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It is widely acknowledged that standards implemented in open source software can reduce risks for lock-in, improve interoperability, and promote competition on the market. However, there is limited knowledge concerning the relationship between standards and their implementations in open source software. This paper reports from an investigation of organisational influences in software standards and open source software implementations of software standards. The study focuses on the RDFa standard and its implementation in the Drupal project.
Widely deployed standards can benefit from contributions provided by a range of different individuals, organisations, and types of organisations either directly to a standardisation project or indirectly via an open source project implementing the standard. Further, we also find that open processes for standardisation adopted by W3C may also contribute to open source projects implementing specific standards.