open video : Java Glossary

Advantages

• It makes it more likely you can view any movie on any computer. Anyone can write a viewer program.
• It makes it more difficult for vendors to collect data improperly.
• It ends lockin.
• Many vendors for the same product means competition and low or free prices.

Disadvantages

• The protocol effectively becomes frozen for all time. It is much harder to change an open protocol. It becomes a political exercise.
• It stifles innovation. Consider how open email protocols have remained frozen incapable of dealing effectively with spam, phishing and counterfeit emails. It becomes politically impossible to modify the protocols.
• You can leave room for new codecs (compression methods), but just as with zip, this is for all practical purposes gets you back to proprietary protocols since not all codecs are universally supported.