Software monoliths are no longer in vogue. Although an application may well be monolithic when it is first built, over time, no application is an island, and even the most complete, most monolithic application will sooner or later need to be part of a large software ecosystem.

Any large software system consists of many parts that need to work together. For the parts to work together, the interfaces can be ad hoc (or point to point), or they can conform to standards. While there is a place for ad hoc interfaces in specialized situations, standards make the world run. It has been argued that the industrial revolution did not take off when the steam engine was invented, but rather when standards emerged for mundane things like threads so that we can go to a hardware store and purchase screws confident that they will fit when we go home.

There are two types of standards: proprietary standards and open standards.

Proprietary standards and the applications built around them are like walled gardens. They can be functional. They can be elegant. They can look beautiful. They can work well. But ultimately, proprietary standards are not owned by the community of those who use them. They are standards imposed by those who own them and as profit maximizing entities, once usage of a standard starts to proliferate, the organization owning it can charge monopolistic rents to those who use the standard. For those who are hooked, a proprietary standard can be restrictive, addictive, expensive, and difficult to break away from.

In contrast, open standards are built by a broad consensus of those who use them and those who provide products and services; by technical experts and those who hope to make a profit. They can be messy. The process of standardization can be protracted. But they work. They can be as restrictive and difficult to break away from as proprietary standards. They can be expensive, but they cannot be overpriced because as long as there are no barriers to competitive entry, prices are market prices rather than monopolistic rents. A good example of an open standard is TCP/IP. That a major vendor of a proprietary standard recently attempted to hijack an open standard setting process shows how much the market values open standards.

Standards can be formal, like the ISO standard Open Document Format, or they can be informal and cultural - such as shaking hands with the right hand (unless you are a boy scout in uniform).

GT.M is an open architecture implementation of MUMPS that based on the philosophy of excelling at what it does, and with an open architecture that leverages the underlying operating system environment for capabilities that the environment provides well using formal and cultural standards.