Technology users are pondering that conundrum more and more as the industry moves to technology standards. Most are administered by a standards body, such as the World Wide Web Consortium, to ensure interoperability between disparate systems.
But some of the most common formats in computing veer away from the standards process in one way or another, creating a nebulous area of "de facto standards" that mix democratic ideals with corporate concerns.
As a result, these technologies are testing long-held assumptions about the standards process.
Some of the most common examples -- such as Microsoft Office and Adobe document formats, Flash Web animations and RSS (really simple syndication) blogging -- map out a changing battleground between proprietary and open publishing models. The ideals of open software and readily interoperable standards are pitted against the drawbacks -- slow-moving standards bodies and a feared design-by-committee mentality -- and the advantages of proprietary software, which include speed and control.
Often, though, software makers find out they don't have to choose -- software that never went to any standards organisation might still, by dint of being first or most popular, become the industry's preferred application by default.
"There are lots of de facto standards in use, and a lot of them work fine," said Sun Microsystems software guru Tim Bray, co-inventor of XML (extensible markup language), one of the most widely used standards in modern computing.
Bray cites Perl, the ubiquitous Web programming language, as an example of a successful de facto standard. "Perl is defined by one implementation, and that's not been a problem."
One of the biggest obstacles to companies entering formal standardisation processes is the fear of getting bogged down in bureaucracy, said Stephen O'Grady, an analyst with research firm RedMonk. "The primary complaint we hear time and time again from vendors about working with standards bodies is the speed," he said. "Developing anything by committee takes time. To get everyone on the same page takes time."
The Microsoft default
For years, one of the most ubiquitous and potentially troublesome of de facto standards has been the document formats used by Office, Microsoft's widespread productivity package. The .doc format for Word documents, .xls for spreadsheets and other formats were and remain proprietary to Microsoft, meaning non-Microsoft applications may have trouble opening the files, or may not display them as intended.
