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In computing, a 'reference implementation' (or, infrequently, sample implementation) is a software example of a standard for use in helping others implement their own versions of the standard. A standard is much easier to understand with a working example in hand. The purpose of a reference implementation is generally to increase awareness and familiarization of the spec within the development community. While it is entirely possible for reference implementation (RI) software to serve in the academic cause of pure knowledge, on a more pragmatic level they are generally intended to familiarize developers and the market with a specification so that developers will be more likely to develop commercial implementations and users will be more likely to purchase conforming implementations.
The reference implementation may or may not be production quality. For example, many people consider the Fraunhofer reference implementation of the MP3 standard a low encoding quality compared to other common implementations such as LAME. However, the X.org reference implementation of the X Window System is not only ready for use, but is increasingly popular on open source Unix-like operating systems as-is; this is helped by the current version being a fork of the popular XFree86 implementation that X.org then declared to be the reference implementation.
Reference implementations may also be prohibited by licensing for commercial use. The Sun Microsystems Java EE RI application server is referenced by great deal of Java EE training literature, but it cannot be licensed for production use. However, the Sun Java System Application Server is considered by some to be nothing more than the RI server with a different licensing agreement.

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