Opinions vary within the enterprise as well.
A plant supervisor might define it differently compared with the vice president of Marketing. To really understand openness from a software perspective, you need to take a look at the underlying technology enablers that create the environment for open applications and tools. A few years ago, Microsoft began developing open products - products that exposed their properties to each other. ActiveX became a standard for integrated technologies that enables software components, written in different languages, to work together in networked environments. ActiveX helped make it easier to integrate a system by using different components from different vendors.