Quotes of the week

The most important thing about standards isn't following them, it's having them. It's more important to have a standard *in theory* than in reality, because if you can get it on paper this makes getting it in fact at a later time much more feasible than if you never wrote it down in the first place.

When POSIX was introduced nobody was compliant, but there was then a specification and from that point forward each successive generation of Unix hackers had a target at which to aim. Computer 'generations' are fast and in a few years we got BSD and Linux systems that are just about as close to fully POSIX compliant as sanity will allow; the lie that was written down as a standard has become a reality.

If nobody had tried and no standard was produced there would be an *even bigger* mess today. Success isn't interoperability today, success is an agreement on what tomorrow's interoperability should look like.

We need more standards, more things that we agree on written down formally, and not just "here's how it's going to be done" READMEs from individual people/projects. The more topics that we can get coverage for in standards today the better our systems will interoperate in 20 years.