At the risk of starting a flamewar, here are some thoughts from rms on standards philosophy. This is relevant because there may be some overlap between what rms is saying and The Linux Way.
Richard: It could, except that we don't religiously try to follow [POSIX]. You have the POSIXLY_CORRECT environment variable. Linuxcare: There are specific examples where POSIX is specifically seen as backwards compatibility. Richard: Basically, my attitude towards standards is that they are useful. They help users figure out how to support a variety of systems, and then they help system implementers figure out how to give the users what the users will expect. But you shouldn't treat standards as though they were gods. There's no need to. We support standards in the ways that are useful to users, and we depart from them when that becomes more useful to users. [snip discussion of how GNU users when polled voted for "du" output in kilobytes but the standard picked 512 byte blocks anyway] http://www.linuxcare.com/news_columns/interviews/index.epl
