As to the discriminatory and societal problems you write about, I don't know. But there are certainly standards for particular fields of applications, like med

As to the discriminatory and societal problems you write about, I don't know. But there are certainly standards for particular fields of applications, like medical IT, enforced through stricter liability laws in that field. In the 1990's and 2000's there was also a very long push for standardization (POSIX/SUSV, programming languages, SQL, SGML/XML, IP protocols, etc.). These efforts (and the success of Java) was also seen as a measure against Microsoft becoming predominant in the 1990's by many developers. But in this decade, it seems like this isn't anymore a priority. A guy here on HN recently wrote that he'd never consider a language environment lacking a "canonical" or solitary implementation (like, say Ruby, Python, PHP, Perl, or other languages tied to their runtimes have). I found this very interesting, as it's the opposite of what I'm doing (I use only use languages having a language spec and multiple implementations). I also see it as a generational phenomenon. Look at node.js today. Back in 2011 or so it started as a really practical asynchronous server-side JavaScript runtime based roughly on CommonJS platform specs also implemented by other JS runtimes. Nowadays, the entire reason to use JS in the first place, its ubiquity/portability, is completely lost, and node.js build setups are approaching or even surpassing J2EE-ish levels of complexity/absurdity (webpack, babel, angularjs, etc.).