Open Data Infrastructure
Open Standard vs Open Source vs Open Governance
A practical distinction between open standards, open source, and open governance, and why buyers need all three in data infrastructure.
The word "open" is doing too much work in data infrastructure. Vendors use it to mean standard, source-available, interoperable, community governed, exportable, or simply "not as closed as last year."
The three opens are different
An open standard defines a shared contract. An open-source project exposes code under a license that meets open-source criteria. Open governance describes who can influence the direction of the project or standard.
Those three things can overlap, but they are not the same. A project can be open source but effectively controlled by one vendor. A product can support an open standard while keeping the useful metadata private. A standard can be open on paper but weak in practice if the ecosystem cannot implement it consistently.
Buyers get hurt when the terms blur
Blurring the terms creates bad buying decisions. Teams hear "open" and assume portability, community influence, and low exit risk. Then they discover the open part is a connector, a file export, or a narrow API path that does not carry policy, lineage, table history, or operational behavior.
Core idea: open source tells you who can inspect the code. Open standards tell you who can implement the contract. Open governance tells you who can shape the future.
ODI needs all three
Open data infrastructure depends on all three. Open table formats need public specifications. Catalogs need interoperable APIs. Projects need governance that is not just one vendor making decisions in public. Products need to prove they can participate without trapping the customer inside private metadata.
That is why procurement should ask more precise questions. What is the license? What is the specification? Who governs it? Which independent implementations exist? What metadata can leave? What breaks when another engine participates?
The practical test
The test is simple. If the vendor disappeared, could the data, metadata, and operating contract still be understood by another competent team using public documentation and open implementations?
If not, the system may still be useful. It just is not as open as the noun pile suggests.
Sources to start with
These are the primary sources I would start from when checking the claims in this piece.