On Sat, Jan 18, 2014 at 3:30 AM, Rustom Mody <rustompm...@gmail.com> wrote: > If you or I break a standard then, well, we broke a standard. > If Microsoft breaks a standard the standard is obliged to change. > > Or as the saying goes, everyone is equal though some are more equal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/800_pound_gorilla Though Microsoft has been losing weight over the past decade or so, just as IBM before them had done (there was a time when IBM was *the* 800lb gorilla, pretty much, but definitely not now). In Unix/POSIX contexts, Linux might be playing that role - I've seen code that unwittingly assumes Linux more often than, say, assuming FreeBSD - but I haven't seen a huge amount of "the standard has to change, Linux does it differently", possibly because the areas of Linux-assumption are areas that aren't standardized anyway (eg additional socket options beyond the spec). The one area where industry leaders still heavily dictate to standards is the web. Fortunately, it usually still results in usable standards documents that HTML authors can rely on. Usually. *twiddles fingers* ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
