Industries leaders re-iterate their well known general resistance to open standards, rightly calling into the issue of the often too slow and bureaucratic process that official standards bodies require. "What's to gain by subjecting already popular technologies to a long, sometimes painful standards process?"

There are a lot of "de facto" standards out there that seem to be working just fine: check Perl, PDF and Flash just to name three easy ones. What the open standards purists say is:

"Ultimately, the protection that standards provide to consumers that one company's products will work with another's. The key thing about open standards is that they're fair, impartial and available for everybody to implement"

So, what do YOU think? Do we really need open standards, or de facto standards can be good enough in most situations?