"Collaborate on the spec; compete on the implementation"

It's an oft-repeated mantra. Billy Newport isn't convinced it's always appropriate.

He is, of course, right. I guess it comes down to the degree to which the entity in question can be written purely on top of other standardised APIs (versus requiring knowledge of internals) and the amount of value that can be added by different implementations.

For example, not all JMS implementations are created equal.....