&gt; Interoperability shouldn’t be an issue – that’s what a standardized protocol is for.<p>It&#x27;s definitely an issue with many cases. Unfortunately people make mistakes in implementation and standards have ambiguities, so a common case is doing a lot of interop experiments and code tweaks, and your position is going to be weak if you&#x27;re not a big player: Others won&#x27;t test their changes against you and their changes may break your interop.<p>Depends a lot on the complexity and maturity of the protocol of course, cost&#x2F;convenience of interop testing, whether there&#x27;s a de-facto standard&#x2F;dominant implementation to be bug compatible with, and whether you need (m)any-to-(m)any interop or not.<p>Something like Bluetooth is going to be the worst case because it&#x27;s physical devices, can&#x27;t test it remotely and you need many-to-many interop testing and there are a zillion implementors with varying levels of competency... and something like SMB is going to be easy because everyone talks to 1-2 server implementations and they&#x27;re just software.<p>Zeroconf might be somewhere in between.