The Linux Foundation has created a new way for open source communities to create Open Standards. Through its new initiative, Community Specification, communities will be able to create standards using tools and approaches that are inspired by open source developers.
Community Specification lets contributors more easily start the specification process, and also reduces administrative overhead. “The Community Specification can dramatically reduce the time developers spend on building and meeting spec requirements and ensure important work is not lost and time is not wasted. By democratizing the specification build process, developers have more time to innovate and build the technologies that differentiate their work from others,” the Linux Foundation wrote in a post.
According to the Linux Foundation, Open Standards are “specifications made available to the public, developed, and maintained via an inclusive, collaborative, transparent, and consensus-driven process.” These standards allow for interoperability and data exchange among different products or services.
The Linux Foundation believes it’s important to have a standards project because items like due process, balance, inclusiveness, and intellectual property clarity are important for developing open-source projects, and a standards project ensures there aren’t any surprises regarding intellectual property down the line.
“The Community Specification builds on these best practices and brings them to the Git repository development environments that developers are already using. And it makes it easy to get started. You can start using the Community Specification by bringing its terms into your repository and getting to work — just like starting an open source project,” the Linux Foundation wrote.
