I love the way this article described standards development and open-source development:
"from the frying pan of standards adoption into the fire of open source implementation"
I'm hoping that this becomes a tried-and-true pattern for web service standards - major work in designing solid standards, and then handed over for open-source implementation. although I confess I don't really have any experience with the standards in question, nor have I even worked with Apache's other web service standards implementations. but I think I know enough about how Apache operates, and have enough excitement for web services to be "high" on the prospect of getting all kinds of open-source tools to integrate things.
but the dynamics of this kind of progress seem to have all the right components.