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as many open standards for interoperability as possible

I don't think that's a good idea. There's the xkcd 927 concern, since there are already long-established standards for a lot of things; and that brings me to what I think we really need, and that is stable standards. The longer a standard has been around unchanged, the more implementations will arise. On the other hand, the browser situation is a great example of what happens when some entity takes control of an "open" standard and then churns it endlessly. I think this is particularly true of programming languages, since they are foundational for everything else.




While stability is very important, openness is still no less important.

A number of standards is still patent-encumbered. Back in the day the algorithm to encode a GIF was patented, do you remember that? Do you remember how long Oracle and Google spent in court debating whether it's acceptable to describe and implement public interfaces?

A world where you can but may not interoperate is very inhospitable, no matter how stable the closed standards are.




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