Things have more or less settled down now, but it was getting pretty ugly at one point when three different Linux standardization efforts were underway. This new focus on standards has arisen because as Linux becomes more popular, it becomes a more attractive platform for the producers of traditional proprietary software. These producers have no interest in releasing different sets of binaries for different distributions. This would dramatically increase their production and testing costs, and so reduce the likelihood that they would offer a Linux port in the first place. They could choose to support just one or a few of the distributions, but this decreases the potential market and again decreases the incentive to port to Linux.
History provides the lesson.
Fragmentation among the various proprietary flavors of Unix hindered development of desktop applications for Unix. This, combined with the high cost of Unix workstations, pretty much eliminated Unix as a contender for the desktop. Linux plus faster and cheaper PCs has solved the cost problem. Standardization is meant to address the fragmentation problem. The implicit assumption here is that proprietary software running on Linux is a good thing.