Subject: An observation about standards compliance in closed software vs. open source

From: Omer Zak <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 7 Jul 2001 15:26:04 +0300 (IDT)

Sun has a test suite for certifying compliance of Java implementations to
its requirements.  It requires people to certify their implementations
before allowing them to be called "Java implementations".

Languages, which started out as open source, have no such official
mechanism (except for TeX, but it is a special case - Knuth constructed an
extensive test suite to certify conformance).  Examples - perl, python.

However, people can expect various implementations to be compatible with
each other (at least, as long as they have the same version).

Possible reasons:
1. When source code is available, people can modify it until it fully
   complies with standards (example - Posix compliance of Linux).
2. When starting to implement for a new platform, people don't need to
   code from the beginning, but can port existing code base to the new
   platform, while modifying it.  In this case, modifications are
   relatively local and can be verified to preserve compatibility (as much
   as the platform allows this).
3. No commercial reasons to lock users into incompatible variants.
                                             --- Omer
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