Standards are decided on by participating individuals, irrespective of their company affiliations. The IETF is where open source and open standards meet. As individuals found ways to communicate through highly leveraged network channels, they were able to share information at a new pace and a new level. Just as the spread of literacy in the late middle ages disenfranchised old power structures and led to the flowering of the renaissance, it's been the ability of individuals to share knowledge outside the normal channels that has led to our current explosion of innovation. Just as ease of travel helped new ideas to spread, wide area networking has allowed ideas to spread and take root in new ways.
Open source is ultimately about communication.
This is one reason behind one of O'Reilly's new open source ventures, the company collab.net , which we founded with Brian Behlendorf of the Apache project. Apache gives us lessons about intentional wide-area collaborative software development that can be applied even by companies who haven't fully embraced open source licensing practices. For example, it is possible to apply open source collaborative principles inside a large company, even without the intention to release the resulting software to the outside world. I like to say that software enables speech between humans and computers. It is also the best way to talk about certain aspects of computer science, just as equations are the best ways to talk about problems in physics.