Superb article about the meaning of Open.
Jonathan Schwartz writes another great article about what’s important about the word Open in an IT context, he does this by comparing and constracting Open Source with Open Standards. he goes further by showing the great work Sun has done to create reference implementations of their J2EE standard, and provide tools to verify compliance. He provides a few real world illustrations of how the difference affects real business decisions.
Definately worth a read.
http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/jonathan/20040808#rewriting_history_and_vocabulary