standard
Standards are necessary for interworking, portability, and reusability. They may be de facto standards for various communities, or officially recognised national or international standards.
Andrew Tanenbaum, in his Computer Networks book, once said, "The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from", a reference to the fact that competing standards become a source of confusion, division, obsolescence, and duplication of effort instead of an enhancement to the usefulness of products.
Some bodies concerned in one way or another with computing standards are IAB (RFC and STD), ISO, ANSI, DoD, ECMA, IEEE, IETF, OSF, W3C.