One of the premises of this article - that &quot;competing standards&quot; exist primarily because of political reasons or shallow decision making - demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of software engineering.<p>Sure, some engineers (especially junior ones) enjoy reinventing the wheel more than using something that already exists to solve users&#x27; problems. We all like to trick ourselves into thinking we&#x27;re unique snowflakes (this problem extends into our personal lives as well). But more often than not, when multiple popular standards emerge, it&#x27;s because there are <i>legitimate engineering tradeoffs</i> that are being made.<p>JSON vs. XML? XML is far more capable but complex. JSON is far simpler but less capable. Sometimes when you&#x27;re delivering value to customers, you need that extra complexity, so you use XML. Other times you don&#x27;t need it so you use JSON. It has nothing to do with ego or politics. Multiple different JSON libraries? One may prioritize ease of use to get up and running, the other may prioritize strong typing for serialization speed. One may prioritize strict compliance with the spec, the other might prioritize speed above all else. JSON vs. a binary format? JSON is  more readily compatible and easier to debug. Binary is faster but more complex to setup. It goes on and on.<p>Again, sometimes competing standards or libraries or languages emerge because of political or capitalistic concerns. But usually when you&#x27;re talking about competing open standards, there are multiple because there are legitimate engineering tradeoffs being made because engineering is not a one-size-fits-all science. (Few sciences are, otherwise they wouldn&#x27;t still have people working on them.)<p>When an open source project rejects a contribution, or five projects exist to solve the same problem, they&#x27;re often making legitimate engineering tradeoffs that are in no way arbitrary, and any one project would suffer to try to be every thing to every person. The article in question doesn&#x27;t even point out a single example of a set of standards or libraries that are entirely arbitrary in their differences or could be collapsed into one solution, which further highlights how this is a theoretical argument, not a practical one.