At the risk of being a bit gnomic: the standard is here to serve me, I am not here to serve the standard. Apparently the Linux community has more of a taste for writing code than worrying about bureaucratic processes. I can't say that I blame them.

When everybody thinks like that, only bureaucrats define standards. Lack of standards let to many problem: I´m just thinking about the amount of power supplies i have to carry. A power supply for the company mobile, a power supply for the iPhone (or at least the USB cable), a power supply for the notebook. I have three small switches from three vendors needing three separate voltages (a standard would be nice here, for example for a central power supply feeding all this stuff). My USB hard drives have their own power supply. The 1.5 TB Maxtor from the special offer have a different one than the 2 1TB Fujitsu-Siemens drives. Standards are bureaucratic, but they help ... but we have to work on them, to enable them to serve us. And at the end it´s the same at power supplies as with Unix standards.