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Without Open Standards, Nothing Fits
Quoting: Without Open Standards, Nothing Fits - FOSS Force —
You arrive in a city you have never visited before. You are tired. You find your room, open your suitcase, pull out a charger, and plug it into the wall. The small green light comes on. You think nothing of it, because nothing happened. You moved between two countries, two electrical grids, two regulatory regimes, and the machine in your hand simply continued to work.
Behind that uneventful moment sits more than a century of meetings, arguments, technical drawings, and compromises between people who will never meet you. The plug fits because somebody, somewhere, decided that it should – and decided further that the decision should be written down, made public, and not owned by anyone. We almost never notice this kind of work. We only notice it when it fails: the adapter that does not fit, the document that does not open, the part that cannot be replaced. Standards are the infrastructure we live inside, and like most infrastructure, they are invisible until they are not.