The best way to ensure nothing new happens is to make that a principle, as Dave Winer has advocated:
Productive open work will only result in standards as long as the parties involved strive to follow prior art in every way possible. Gratuitous innovation is when the standardization process ends, and usually that happens quickly. Think about the process of arriving at a standard. Someone goes first with something new. Assume it catches on and becomes popular. Because the person did it in an open way, with no patents, or other barriers to competitors using the technology, a second developer decides to do the same thing. The innovator supports this, because he or she wants a standard to develop. At that point the second person has the power to decide how strong a standard it will be. If the new implementation strives to work exactly as the original does, then it’s more likely the standard will be strong, and there will be a vibrant market around it. But if the second party decides to use the concept but not be technically compatible, it will be a weak standard.
Read Winers whole statement here.
As soon as rules outside of the marketplace of ideas are made which guard against innovation, advances stodge and we are stuck with innovations led only by those who advocate conservativism. We are witnessing an effort again now to control change on the web by a few as we did with Microsoft in the 1990s. There is an interesting analogy to a point in legal history in the 1800’s in which logical innovations such as negligence were held back by capitalists who did not want to be held accountable under civil law for the accidents caused by industrialization. The same theme is seen now in the rejection of criminal sanctions for industrial polluters.
A call to control of standards is foremost a call to “follow and pay me” to tell you what you what you can figure out yourselves.
If you want to be led, listen to self-appointed leaders aka “gurus” – a word which should be seen as a slander. If you want the best, unleash the innovative.