How standards enable innovation

Modern software is fragile, bloated, and trapped in a constant cycle of breaking changes. We spend more time managing dependencies and writing compatibility wrappers than we do solving actual problems. This is mainly because we dont respect standards.

The fallacy
There is a common misconception that "standards deter innovation". It is a convenient excuse that allows us to move fast and break things, leaving behind technical debt and incompatibility. But it is fundamentally false. Standards do not deter innovation. They are the platform upon which stable innovation is possible.

The reality
A standard defines the agreed upon way for things to interact but says nothing about the implementation. The C programming language is a perfect example. The ISO C standard is a precise, formal document that defines the grammar, the keywords, and the behavior of the language. This is the "what". But how you implement it is where innovation thrives. We have GCC and Clang, which are compliant C compilers but are wildly different and innovative pieces of engineering.

"But ..."
"But what if my idea is so new, so revolutionary, that the existing standard can't accommodate it"? This is a valid question for which we have a clear answer. You can:

• Evolve the Standard: Standards are not meant to be static forever. You can write proposals to the publishing body and help create the next version. This is how we got C23 from C89, or Vulkan from OpenGL.
• Publish a New Standard: If your idea is a true paradigm shift, then do the hard work of formalizing it. Write a specification. Create a reference implementation. This is how Wayland came to challenge X11. It's how new technologies earn their place.

What you don't do is break the existing standard and call it "innovation".