Open Source refers to the availability of the source code of a piece of software in a given programming language with a license in which the copyright holders provide the rights to study, change, and distribute the software to anyone and for any purpose. An open platform does not necessarily mean it is open source

The implementation should be based on agile open standards. Any willing party should be able to use these standards without charge to build an independent, compliant instance of the complete platform

It should be possible to connect any implementation of the open platform to all others that were independently developed, in a federated structure, to allow the sharing of appropriate information and workflows between them

There should be a set of common information models in use by all instances of the open platform, independent of any given technical implementation. An example is the Common Information Model (CIM) which was developed by DMTF as a computer industry standard to enable systems administrators and managers to control devices and applications across different vendors. In this way, products can be controlled based on the same kind of information (e.g., device name, model, serial number, network location, capacity, etc.)

The standards should not depend on particular technologies or require components from particular vendors. Anyone building an implementation of the open platform may elect to use any available technology and may choose to include or exclude proprietary components

Data should be exposed as needed (subject to good information governance practice) in an open, shareable, computable format in near to real-time. Implementors may choose to use this format natively in their persistence (storage) layer of the open platform itself or meet this requirement by using mappings and transformations from some other open or proprietary format

The full specification of the APIs (the means by which applications are connected to the platform) should be freely available

Adoptability refers to enabling others to use the open platform while bypassing specific business development negotiations. This does not necessarily mean that the usage has to be royalty-free; it is rather about published, clear, and generally applicable (non-discriminatory) terms and conditions, usually known as the license.

Assuming that the specifications are publicly available, adaptability of an open platform refers to the possibility of changing existing functionality of the platform itself as opposed to adding new functionality.