Working On the Railroad

Standards are often taken for granted though they are not easy to achieve.

This thought was the result of an unexpected weekend project where the kitchen sink faucet decided to spring a leak. While I am no Joe the Plumber, I decided to save some time and money and fix the problem myself.

Like proprietary software, it turns out the innards of a faucet have some design-centric features the manufacturer has used that makes it tricky to just take it apart and repair internal problems. Unless, of course, you're a professional and not a weekend amateur like me. So, it became obvious that it would just be easier to swap out the whole thing, since the faucet in question was likely a couple decades old.

It was during this swap out that the existence of standards really came in handy. Because, even though I was working with pipes that were really old and a new faucet that was was not, everything connected quite easily.

Now, I don't know the history of plumbing (and most of my friends are very happy to know this), but I would imagine that such standards were not easy to achieve. I am certain that there have been competing proprietary designs of pipes and joints and values, until somehow and somewhen, people got together and started agreeing on how all these things were supposed to come together--at least, here in the US.

While I don't know about plumbing, I am a little more familiar with the history of railroad standards. There's an urban legend out there that says the standard gauge of railroad tracks has a direct correlation from the width of Roman chariots. That's actually not the case, since railroad gauges all over the world vary even today. In the US, during the evolution of the rail system, competing railroads used various gauges as they spread all over the countryside.

At first, it was done simply because the railroads were usually so far apart and unconnected, there was no need to keep the width of the tracks standardized. As progress was made, and tracks converged into the same cities and towns, the decision was initially made to keep track widths different because rail operators wanted to force freight and passengers to shift one one carrier to another.

For a while, when rail travel and transport was a novelty, people were willing to put up with the inconvenience. But as people grew used to rails, they began to wonder why all this switching had to take place--especially the owners of the freight, who had to pay significant sums for the labor and time to get their goods from one carrier to the next.

It was the desire for commerce that pushed the need for a common gauge, in much the same way commerce is pushing the need for a standardized Linux today. (The parallels aren't complete; the US Civil War greatly accelerated the standardization process, as the Northern rails wanted to push quickly into the South after the war was over.)

After the standardization of the gauges, there was still competition between the railroads. (And that's an understatement, given the bloody history between rival rail carriers.) So standardization didn't deprive them of that. In due time, the rails were able to compete on the merits of their service, and after standardization, the most successful of them were able to enjoy a long and profitable history---until the advent of the superhighway and jet travel negatively impacted their passenger and freight business.

It's pretty much this philosophy that drives the Foundation's push of the Linux Standard Base: get the core stuff standardized, so the distributions can compete on the merits of their service, support, and all the other value adds a distribution company can offer clients.

Something to ponder when you get that glass of water from the tap.