Z:gnu-www-ja-rms-nyu-2001-transcript--97a82f-Another thing that results fro/en

Another thing that results from the fact that the user is king is that we tend to be very good about compatibility and standardization. Why? Because users like that. Users are likely to reject a program that has gratuitous incompatibilities in it. Now, sometimes there's a certain group of users which actually have a need for a certain kind of incompatibility, and then they'll have it. That's OK. But when users want is to follow a standard, we developers have to follow it, and we know that. And we do it. By contrast, if you look at proprietary software developers, they often find it advantageous to deliberately not follow a standard, and not because they think that they're giving the user an advantage that way, but rather because they're imposing on the user, locking the user in. And you'll even find them making changes in their file formats from time to time, just to force people to get the newest version.