Source Code Isn't A Standard
Savio Rodrigues just wrote about a colleague testing a bunch of browsers based on the open source WebKit rendering engine. To his dismay, "no two are exactly the same". Or, as he put it, "A WebKit-based browser is, well, whatever the vendor wants it to be."
If you take a bunch of different applications that all implement WebKit, you would expect them to render the same things the same ways, but the evidence proves otherwise. My take-away from this little discovery could be summed up like so: Source code isn't a standard.
Source code is a building block, not a standard. It's something you turn into other things. A standard is something that stands above and apart from all of those things, a guideline for what that finished product ought to be like.
I get the impression many people who deal with open source expect source code to act like a standard, or serve as some kind of substitute for a standard.
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