The benefits of standards around connectivity

Standards aren’t flashy. In and of themselves, they don’t tend to get most people excited. The excitement from standards most often comes from seeing what’s built on top of them. Open and free standards are critical to how systems work, including the most ubiquitous system that I can think of: the internet. Here’s a quote from Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web and the technologies that made it possible, such as HTML and HTTP:

It was the standardization around HTML that allowed the web to take off. It was not only the fact that it is standard but the fact that it is open and royalty-free. [...] Yes, we need standards, because the money and the excitement are not competing over the technology at that level. The excitement is in the businesses and applications that you build on top.

If you haven’t noticed, you’re on the eighth chapter of a book about one such standard: Apache Arrow...