Jim Waldo’s weblog, Why Standards?: I can’t think of a single standard that was invented by committee that has survived in the marketplace. The long-standing standards are those that were first de facto standards, and were described (not invented) by the standards bodies. Such standards didn’t start out in a standards body. They started out solving problems. Because they solved the problems, people used them. The use drove the standard, not the other way around. This allows innovation, this allows technical progress. Things that work get used by people who are trying to solve problems.

A thought-provoking and accurate piece. Of course, the problem with de facto standards is that they almost always end up being owned and controlled by the company that invents them, making it very difficult for other would-be implementors to be compatible. And isn’t that the point of having standards?

Since the point of standards is to allow competing implementations to be compatible and interoperate, most de facto standards aren’t really standards at all as much as they are competitive weapons. Microsoft, in particular, knows this better than anyone and has played the “standards” game masterfully.

Effective standards don’t come out of committees, but neither do they come out of competition, at least not in the proprietary world. That’s why the open source community plays such an important role in our industry today. The open source community offers a proving ground in which emerging technologies can compete and de facto standards can emerge that are actual standards, not merely competitive weapons of the companies that invent them. This, more than anything else about open source software, is what makes it valuable.