that's wishful thinking, afaiac. in my experience, commercial software is rewritten just about as often as non-commercial software, for one thing. for another, specs often are complete crap. not so much because they contain bad ideas, but more often because they are overly complex or worded in an ambiguous manner.

take soap, for example. overengineered, because when there was no real implementation lots of things probably sounded like good ideas. now half the implementations implement half the spec (all different halves), and have to concentrate on a common subset in order to interoperate. you know what? that common subset is almost as simple as xml-rpc, which was defined because soap was deemed to complex.

that being said, xml-rpc is rather limited because - among other things - it allows only for 32 bit integers. it's not a great spec either, but it works because it's easily implemented and simple enough that interoperability problems are rare.

i don't think linus is right in dismissing specs. some specs, such as rfc 2045/2046 are complex and still pretty unambiguous. you can work with them, therefore they are useful specs.