The economics of open standards

Lots of articles have been written about open standards and especially the OpenDocument Format (ODF). The primary reasons being that Oasis recently aproved ODF as a standard and that Massachusetts recently chose to adobt it as their primary format and left Microsofts format out in the cold.

A lot has since happened as you will be aware of if you've read Groklaw or Andy Updegrove's Standards blog.

One aspect of using open standards is economics. How much money can you potentially save by using open standards instead of proprietary? I don't remember seeing any research on this before now, but it looks like this might be changing as you can read in this LinuxJournal article:

I also brought up some examples of how closed formats make a huge impact on private and public digital archives. One example is the Virginia State Laws declaring, due to a lack of hardware and software standards, that electronic records are not acceptable yet for permanent storage. Microfilm and alkaline paper are allowed, but they are much more expensive, not searchable with a computer and unaccessible from the Internet. Another example is a report published in 2000 that discovered most organizations hadn't even realized they had a data preservation problem. Those who were aware of the problem also knew the total cost per year to fix the problem would range from $10,000 to $2.6 million.

This is an important battle, much more important than the battle between proprietary and open source. I hope the governments around the world will see the light and switch to using truly free and open standards. It is really the only sensible choice. Politicians sometimes make incredible stupid choices and laws though, just see my previous post for a shining example of this.