Apparently, Dave Winer went to the Torvalds school on specs:

Linux creator Linus Torvalds began the discussion saying, "a 'spec' is close to useless. I have _never_ seen a spec that was both big enough to be useful _and_ accurate. And I have seen _lots_ of total crap work that was based on specs. It's _the_ single worst way to write software, because it by definition means that the software was written to match theory, not reality."

The crucial difference being, Torvalds is talking about an OS kernel, while Winer's "specs" are supposed to define a method for interoperability.