> That's a common adage, yet some of our most used technologies are created or maintained by committees - the Internet, web technologies, ECMAScript (enemy thou

> That's a common adage, yet some of our most used technologies are created or maintained by committees - the Internet, web technologies, ECMAScript (enemy though it started out as a single person project), C++, OpenSSL, Unicode - these are all design-by-committee projects. I think "created or maintained by committees" here is not precise enough. In most of these cases, especially in the case of net technologies, ECMAScript, and C++, a committee came into place only after independent vendors began to blaze the trail on their own. The committee's job here was to take existing implementations and distill them into a standard. This is important because individual entities often have almost no incentive to cooperate otherwise. However, there are examples of initiatives created top-down by committee that ended up becoming too complicated to achieve actual usage. The OSI Model vs the TCP/IP model [1] is a good example of this failure. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_protocol_suite#Comparison_of_TCP/IP_and_OSI_layering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_protocol_suite#Compar...