You have to be the market leader, then the other 149 other software providers will implement it in order to take part of your market. One (costly) thing I lear

You have to be the market leader, then the other 149 other software providers will implement it in order to take part of your market. One (costly) thing I learned a couple times as an entrepreneur is that it's almost impossible for a small company to make a market but they can sometimes move a market. In the same way, you might not be able to make the standard (the fact that you refer to it as "our OSS interop protocol" is telling) but you might be able to coordinate an industry group that starts with something small and grows it to what you'd like it to be. Warning: This takes an extraordinary amount of time (I've been part of RFCs that took 4-5 years for complex protocols).