I'd distinguish between engineers who use the things that are/aren't standardized, and engineers who build them. The former often like standards because the pai

I'd distinguish between engineers who use the things that are/aren't standardized, and engineers who build them. The former often like standards because the pain of dealing with incompatibilities can overwhelm any possible advantage of doing things differently. The latter tend to have strong opinions about the technical details of what they're building, which may clash with what the standards dictate. Couple anecdotes: here's a quote from Richard Stallman: http://karmak.org/archive/2003/01/12-14-99.epl.html http://karmak.org/archive/2003/01/12-14-99.epl.html "Richard: Basically, my attitude towards standards is that they are useful. They help users figure out how to support a variety of systems, and then they help system implementors figure out how to give the users what the users will expect. But you shouldn't treat standards as though they were gods. There's no need to. We support standards in the ways that are useful to users, and we depart from them when that becomes more useful to users. ... It was already approved and we had already had a chance to object, so all I could do was make a comment. So I couldn't block approval of the standard because I was a voting member of the committee. I couldn't block approval of the standard on those grounds, so instead...I posted a notice about the coup in which the evil repressive forces of POSIX were being thrown off...To have an excuse to say that we still support the spec, if you define the environment variable, POSIX_ME_HARDER was the original way. Then a slightly prudish board member convinced me to change it to POSIXLY_CORRECT which I now think was a mistake. I should have left it as POSIX_ME_HARDER." It's interesting that IMO Stallman-the-politician (for me not a negative term, BTW) comes off as much more of a standards advocate than Stallman-the-engineer.