Join Digistan and hundreds of individuals from across the globe in signing The Hague Declaration on Free and Open Standards. The Digital Standards Organization (Digistan) was founded by a group of open standards professionals in 2007 with the goal of promoting customer choice, vendor competition, and overall growth in the global digital economy through the understanding, development, and adoption of open digital standards.

The Digistan definition of a free and open standard is based on the 'European Interoperability Framework for pan-European eGovernment Services' (EIF v1 ) definition of "open standard" which defines free and open standard as follows:

    * The standard is adopted and will be maintained by a not-for-profit organization, and its ongoing development occurs on the basis of an open decision-making procedure available to all interested parties.

    * The standard has been published and the standard specification document is available freely. It must be permissible to all to copy, distribute, and use it freely.

    * The patents possibly present on (parts of) the standard are made irrevocably available on a royalty-free basis.

    * There are no constraints on the re-use of the standard.