Shared specifications and shared standards are an admirable goal as long as the “standards” are not acting as limitations to the advancement of a given technology. This was the problem that KDE ran into with the use of Corba. It was a open and shared standard used by KDE (and Gnome) in its early development. But we quickly discovered that it became a nightmare to manage/extend to the more advanced uses that we wanted to see KDE move towards. The decision was made (and lots of “shared standard” developers SCREAMED about the change) to switch to a custom KDE specification now known as KParts. History has shown that decision to use KParts was the correct one, as KDE would NOT have progressed to the level it has using Corba.
As long as the standard is good for KDE development and advances our ability to provide application solutions to users (and developers) then I am all for shared standards. But the moment those standards hold back KDE development in the interest of some “perceived” value from shared specifications. We can all agree on standards up until those standards have the net result of holding-back all of our development efforts equally.
Think of specifications as food for software. Good standards will help you (or your software project) grow strong and healthy. Bad standards will make your application bloated, lethargic, and will eventually be the cause of most of your application “sickness.” Standards are NOT more important than the applications (arguably they are part of the application, but a part is seldom more important than the whole.) Because they are NOT more important than the applications themselves, comments like this verge on being insulting.
The fact that KDE gets appreciated this much and that KDE is the market leader in UNIX and Linux desktops today is negligible compared to the extremely important effort to create a single specification of the free desktop environment.
Also, I think too many people get shared specifications confused with open specifications. KDE (and Gnome for that matter) will ALWAYS have open specifications because of the very nature of F/OSS. Open standards are very very important, shared standards are less important. One could argue that Microsoft DOC format is a shared standard because just about every office package in existence tries to write and save to it. That doesn’t make it an open standard.