[HN Gopher] Tim Sweeney: "ISO obstructs adoption of standards by...
___________________________________________________________________
Tim Sweeney: "ISO obstructs adoption of standards by paywalling
them"
Author : linksbro
Score : 485 points
Date : 2021-03-08 19:04 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| rdpintqogeogsaa wrote:
| > The value of standards is in their adoption.
|
| Tim Sweeney correctly observes this, then continues to talk about
| "millions of hobbyist programmers". I do not believe that ISO
| targets, or even has any remote interest, in this market.
|
| ISO is comprised of nation-state members who will inevitably
| mandate ISO standards as part of legal compliance. Various
| stakeholders actually participate in standardization efforts and
| thus also both already know the standard and are able to push it
| through. All of these categories (government, industries in
| highly regulated sectors and large stakeholders) have large
| amounts of capital. The amount of money required to fund a
| purchase of an ISO standard barely even factors in on a balance
| sheet.
|
| Hobbyist programmers arguably make a lot of open source software
| that builds the foundation for today's and tomorrow's platforms.
| However, when the big bulldozers from the previous paragraph roll
| in, hobbyist programmers give way to highly paid employees of
| these giants; be it by merging a patch or be it by being worked
| around with a greenfield project or fork.
|
| On the other hand, ISO has an incentive in charging money for
| their standards because this adds perceived value: If something
| is freely available, it is easier to dismiss it as a non-serious
| effort when debating whether it is worth to bind personnel for
| participation in the standards committees; the standards come
| across as valueless, worthless.
|
| Looking at this vector of interests of the various parties
| involved, I see little reason for this state of affairs to
| improve.
| oezi wrote:
| ISO actually shouldn't have an incentive to charge more money
| than the support of the standardization process costs.
|
| Also, regulators should (in my opinion) pay for standards to be
| freely available when they harmonize/adopt them for their
| country/countries. It is kind of insane that one as a customer
| can't access the rules by which products are approved without
| paying. It is as if laws would be hidden behind paywalls.
| luplex wrote:
| Actually, laws are kind of hidden behind paywalls! For most
| laws, I wouldn't trust my own judgement on their
| interpretation and would have to pay a lawyer.
| deckard1 wrote:
| This always struck me as the dagger into the idea of
| freedom. How can one follow the law if one is not fully
| informed of the law?
|
| Of course, those with money like it this way. It's a
| barrier for competition and exercising your rights.
|
| Once you start looking at barriers, such as ISO, you start
| noticing them everywhere. Real estate, dentistry, doctors,
| school teachers. You can't even cross state lines as a
| school teacher, or other professions. People often argue
| that software developers should be licensed much like
| engineers. Let's be thankful that's not the case. Imagine
| the headache of being remote and having to get licensed in
| multiple states!
| ngrilly wrote:
| Not in France. Everything is publicly accessible on
| Legifrance.gouv.fr.
| phlo wrote:
| There's an important distinction here. Laws (and court
| decisions) are freely available in many (most?) places.
| Relevant commentary on how these laws are applied tends
| to be more costly.
|
| I'm not very familiar with the situation in France, but I
| can offer a data point from Switzerland: The civil code
| is (of course) freely available online and in PDF format.
| A printed copy is available for CHF 15 or so1, both from
| the federal press and from other publishers who might
| throw in an index or a keyword reference at the same
| price.
|
| However, if you're actually looking to apply any of the
| contents, you'll want qualified explanation and
| references to jurisprudence alongside the legal text.
| Affordable commentary2 on the civil code start at CHF 250
| or so, and the industry standard "Basler Kommentar" to
| the civil code is sold as two volumes, retailing for CHF
| 598.- each.
|
| 1 It's a few hundred pages; IIUC the price pretty much
| reflects the cost of printing, binding and logistics. Key
| point: Nobody is getting rich off of selling these.
|
| 2 For the civil code, specifically, you'd be in luck:
| Some consumer advocacy organizations publish hands-on
| guidebooks that are significantly cheaper than the usual
| commentaries. So you might get by on CHF 100 or so. But
| these tend to not be available for other, less
| mainstream, laws.
| cma wrote:
| Binding legal precedent is often paywalled to read too.
| whoknew1122 wrote:
| Just last year the US Supreme Court ruled (in a 5-4 split
| decision) that states can't put their laws behind a paywall.
| Before that it wasn't terribly uncommon for that to happen.
|
| Capitalism, baby!
| boarnoah wrote:
| Would IETF where the specs are publicly accessible but it's
| vendors and so on in the various working groups be a better
| model?
| fanf2 wrote:
| In principle, people participate in the IETF as individuals,
| though in practice it matters who they are employed by.
| hrktb wrote:
| There is a middle ground between hobbyist and large
| stakeholders that ends in the worst spot.
|
| As you point out those are legal requirements, and a
| small/middle size company would need to know them before
| entering a field or hitting some legally bound clients. The
| paying upfront makes it difficult to do pure discovery to even
| know how hard are the requirements to implement.
|
| I saw that at a small company where we could have been
| interested in applying for a standard, as a nice to have to
| bring more business. But the cost of paying for the doc, go
| through it to then perhaps realize it's not worth it, brought
| enough friction that it was delayed to oblivion.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Yup. Monetization of things that ought to be free and
| standardized is one of the biggest unnecessary drags on
| productivity growth today. That many non-profit bodies
| contribute to it just makes it more sad. Large companies
| don't care about this relatively small cost, and they
| actually benefit from the (small) moat that monetization
| creates.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| But I think the ISO paywall prevents adoption in the market
| you're describing too. I've worked in enterprise and government
| facing commercial databases for half a decade, been involved in
| dozens of discussions about whether some proposed piece of
| syntax is standards-compliant, and I haven't once encountered a
| reference to a section or page number of the actual SQL:2016
| ISO standard.
| Hjfrf wrote:
| The only bits people actually know are yyyy-mm-dd and pre-92
| implicit joins.
| munk-a wrote:
| Modern SQL standards seem to be primarily written by the
| PostgreSQL team - new features they roll out and syntax to
| describe them tend to be widely adopted. Granted, it could be
| coming out of ISO itself but nobody would be able to tell
| since their standards aren't openly published.
| yarcob wrote:
| ISO standards are often discussed at PostgreSQL
| conferences, and whenever possible they try to follow the
| standards. Sometimes standards are written after PostgreSQL
| implements a feature, and it some cases it seems like they
| are even written to accomodate PostgreSQL (eg. the SQL/JSON
| standard seems to take into consideration that a database
| might have multiple JSON types just like PostgreSQL)
|
| But whenever the topic of standards comes up, someone
| immediately mentions the high price of the standards, and I
| think only some of the developers actually have a copy of
| the SQL standards.
| onion2k wrote:
| _I do not believe that ISO targets, or even has any remote
| interest, in this market._
|
| "Hobbyist programmers" in this context includes "pre-revenue
| startup founders" and "open source project maintainers". Those
| people need to have access to standards and shutting them out
| only serves as a barrier to the industries their applications
| could disrupt.
| ngrilly wrote:
| It's not just an issue for hobbyist programmers. That's also an
| issue for most startups and small companies. You just can't buy
| all the documents you need when you're designing hardware. That
| stuff is insane. And it's not just about the cost, it's also
| about the time necessary to buy these documents. Creates way
| too much friction compared to the open model of the IETF, W3C,
| Unicode Consortium, etc. The ISO and other organisms using
| paywalls live in the past and are hurting innovation.
| launderthis wrote:
| well I guess innovation has a price (or maybe a cost). And as
| long as ISO puts up a paywall they have determined by market
| forces what that cost is.
|
| My perspective on this idea is that altruism is dead when it
| comes to open source. Peoples work needs to be paid for.
| Weather its ISO or the guy creating a program using it. We
| are not to be slaves to the future and I dont wish that for
| future devs. Making a profit isnt evil but wanting others
| work for free is selfish. People can always make their own
| standards and come together across nations and do the work.
| But they much rather cry and call hardworking people bad.
|
| Tim is trying to save a buck I bet.
| dpatterbee wrote:
| I'm fairly confident that Epic Games don't have any issues
| paying a few thousand dollars for any ISO standard they
| wish to have access to.
| brian-armstrong wrote:
| This isn't a robust way to write good software. It's better to
| capture the requirements up front and apply those early on in
| the project's life. Relying on other users to notice defects is
| likely to result in only some of the software being correct.
| Especially if it's a date library, the author should be able to
| know the proper date format at the outset.
| inetknght wrote:
| > _Tim Sweeney correctly observes this, then continues to talk
| about "millions of hobbyist programmers". I do not believe that
| ISO targets, or even has any remote interest, in this market._
|
| I completely disagree. As a hobbyist programmer I want to
| improve myself so that I can sell my skills to international
| standards. It's more difficult to do that when standards have
| to be _bought_ before I can even determine how hard it would be
| to learn and adapt to it.
| whoknew1122 wrote:
| The parent's point is that ISO doesn't care about you, the
| hobbyist programmer.
|
| The parent wasn't saying that millions of hobbyist
| programmers don't care about standards. The point is that
| millions of hobbyist programmers DO care about standards. But
| ISO doesn't care about the milions of hobbyist programmers
| and therefore paywalls standards.
| indymike wrote:
| Actually, hobbyist programmers often create what become
| competing standards to the ISO track one resulting in low
| adoption of the ISO standard.
| linksbro wrote:
| Perhaps it will be beneficial in the discussion to add examples
| of other orgs e.g. IETF, Unicode. Unicode spec is fully
| available[1] and their funding comes from a membership-model
| rather than a pay-model[2].
|
| ISO's argument is compelling but we see other standards
| organizations taking different approaches and more or less
| still finding success.
|
| [1] http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode13.0.0/ [2]
| https://home.unicode.org/membership/why-join/
| r3un1 wrote:
| I'm afraid that you are comparing apples and Walmart.
|
| Unicode is a standard for encoding characters. ISO is an
| organisation that _creates_ standards for just about
| anything.
|
| Unicode became a standard as a result of beating other
| competing standardisations. ISO declares that whatever they
| came up with is the standard, no competition required. Hence
| the effectiveness of the business model.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| Parent is talking about the Unicode Consortium, not the
| character encoding, that the consortium is responsible for.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_Consortium
| [deleted]
| EricE wrote:
| If I have a choice or am in a position to influence a
| decision, I always push for open standards orgs like OASIS:
| https://www.oasis-open.org
| smarx007 wrote:
| OASIS is good but there member orgs need to pay membership
| dues and do it every year. I think ISO encourages
| independent experts from public sector and academia to
| provide expert feedback without paying for membership.
|
| Though, I think that ISO can be fully funded by the
| national standards bodies on an annual basis just like
| OASIS is funder by companies and not charge for PDFs.
| Mindless2112 wrote:
| Also ECMA (C# and JavaScr... er, ECMAScript) which provides
| standards at no cost vs ANSI (no notable language specs since
| C and Pascal) which charges a fee.
| leowbattle wrote:
| Last year I finished the school year early because of the
| coronavirus lockdown and had too much free time - so I
| wrote an interpreter for CLR bytecode
| (https://github.com/Leowbattle/clr_lite). The ECMA-335
| standard contained everything I needed to know for that
| project: documentation of the EXE format, VM instructions,
| etc.
|
| I learned a lot doing this project, and I would never have
| been able to do it without free access to the standard. So
| I think Tim is right to recognise the value open standards
| provide to hobbyist programmers.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| ANSI for languages now operates under the aegis of ISO. For
| the C and C++ languages, ANSI is one of the voting member
| bodies.
| [deleted]
| 1f60c wrote:
| I _think_ "ECMA C#" lags behind C# as implemented in .NET,
| but still.
| dblohm7 wrote:
| > hobbyist programmers give way to highly paid employees of
| these giants
|
| They all learned C++ somewhere, and I doubt that most of them
| had access to the official ISO standard while doing it. (Yes,
| I'm aware of the final drafts etc)
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > They all learned C++ somewhere, and I doubt that most of
| them had access to the official ISO standard while doing it.
|
| There's a difference between "learning to use" and
| "implementing" (though having access to the standard is good
| for both, it's more critical for the latter.)
| cushychicken wrote:
| Ah, the old fallacy of "If they charge money for it, it must be
| good!"
|
| Meanwhile, Oracle out here laughing their way to the bank.
| justicezyx wrote:
| True, but you missed the underlying concept of this statement.
|
| The trend of innovation is increasingly becoming grassroots-
| driven.
|
| In part, that's because our fundamental research advancement
| has stagnated, i.e., the nation states can no longer steadily
| produces ground breaking tech that leaves the industry to
| adopt. As a result the adopt of standards become more relevant
| to SMBs and individuals.
|
| On the other hand, Internet has driven down the knowledge
| acquisition cost to probably bare minimal. I.e., modern days,
| one who has good understanding of English can learn pretty much
| any highest-level of knowledge almost for free. The SMBs and
| individuals are becoming more and more sophisticated, making
| them gradually become competent to be involved in the
| standardization process.
|
| In short, ISO's practice is fine looking from a perspective of
| 10 years ago, but it's now wrong.
| launderthis wrote:
| > The trend of innovation is increasingly becoming
| grassroots-driven
|
| Please qualify this, I call bs. I acutally think its harder
| and harder to innovate now a days and we need large companies
| to innovate because scale is now the battle for any product
| that makes an impact.
|
| If its a "trend" then you must have historical data that
| displays the change and im sure you have a hard definition
| for "innovation" and "grassroots". This is basically a
| flippant comment that Im not even sure you feel strongly
| about but it sounds nice.
|
| > down the knowledge acquisition cost to probably bare
| minimal
|
| you dont understand how important experience is. Books have
| been around for centuries, all this knowledge was not much
| more difficult to get decades ago but you still have people
| cant perform surgery from reading a book or create a rocket
| ship. Knowledge is about 10% of the solution to any problem.
|
| >individuals are becoming more and more sophisticated
|
| Complicated yes, sophisticated no. Look at music, you think
| this is a sophisticated society???
| NHQ wrote:
| Standards should be myriad and have benchmarks.
| s17n wrote:
| What do nation-states and legal compliance have to do with
| standards like C++ and SQL? I've never heard of a government
| mandating that compilers be standards compliant, or anything
| like that.
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| ISO deals with _way_ more than just C++ and SQL.
| [deleted]
| chrismcb wrote:
| People adapting the standards adds more value than perception.
| If these standards are being paid for by governments, then of
| course they should be free. But it they aren't free, it means
| not everyone will adapt then, and lowers their value
| munk-a wrote:
| I think the real issue comes from once-removed tools. The
| people writing a tool that you use may have access to and
| adhere to some ISO standards, and that information may be
| quite helpful for debugging while they're building their tool
| - but it doesn't really help you all that much since you lack
| access to those same standards.
|
| The C++ standard is pretty different and an interesting
| example here, traditionally there were portions of the
| standard that weren't really accessible and that, in part,
| contributed to different compilers not being called out on
| differences of opinion along with the ability to have
| differences of opinion not being called out by experts since
| they didn't have access to the standards to see where those
| contradictions lay.
|
| In the modern world the C++ standard is what I think ISO
| should aim for with all their standards, it is widely
| available and heavily discussed and that feedback has allowed
| the standard to grow by leaps and bounds as the language has
| adopted things once seen as impossible (outside of Qt &
| boost) like foreaches and not-terrible-to-work-with lambdas.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Tim Sweeney correctly observes this, then continues to talk
| about "millions of hobbyist programmers". I do not believe that
| ISO targets, or even has any remote interest, in this market.
|
| They probably don't. And, maybe that made sense decades ago
| when it was more true (though this has never been completely
| true) that serious software came out of big industry with up-
| front allocation of resources, whereas what any hobbyist
| programmers were working on was something else entirely. Today,
| much serious software is built by informal networks of
| developers who don't necessarily share an organizational
| affiliation even if some of them have institutional sponsors.
| And a lot of it evolves fluidly, without mandated standards as
| institutional requirements, so if developers can't get a
| standard freely to assess it for fitness, they simply won't
| consider it at all. Thet'll either ignore it entirely, or
| approximate the behavior of some other piece of software that
| implements (perhaps not faithfully) functionality from the
| standard relevant to the needs of the new project (maybe making
| alterations to suit the different use case, without reference
| to the inaccessible standard, which may have a solution for the
| new projects problem that the project used as a model didn't
| need.)
|
| ISO/ANSI/etc. model of selling standards documents to fund the
| standards maintenance organization introduces friction for even
| "serious software" in that environment, whereas the models used
| by the IETF, ECMA, W3C, etc., that funded standards work
| without relying on selling standards docs does not.
|
| Now, of course, there's an easy workaround; if you want
| technology to be used, and multiple standards organizations
| make standards in the field, don't submit it (at least not
| exclusively) to the paid-access organizations. But you've also
| got to get, e.g., governments onboard so that they don't adopt
| paid-access standards into law.
| bombcar wrote:
| In a time of vast databases of paywalled scientific papers you're
| telling me nobody has a collection of ISO standards?
| oasisbob wrote:
| If there is, I haven't found it yet. Many national standards
| I've seen don't seem to even have DOIs assigned.
|
| My tiny stash of climbing relevant EN safety standards only
| exists because of a scrappy Russian climbing community web
| server someone uploaded to.
| Daho0n wrote:
| Most would likely not even understand them as they are written
| in the best example of newspeak (from '1984') I have ever seen.
| userbinator wrote:
| There are torrents of related ones floating around, although
| they tend to be huge and not very seeded. For computing-related
| ones, especially popular subjects, you can often find a copy
| someone has hosted sneakily amongst other unrelated documents
| if you search hard enough.
| captn3m0 wrote:
| LibGen has a section for standards, but I've rarely found it
| useful.
|
| A better hack is to approach your local standards body. BIS in
| India publishes the ISO standards mostly-as-is as adopted by
| Indian Law/Regulations. They don't make it easily accessible on
| the Internet, but it's available if you ask them for it.
| olieidel wrote:
| Finally this is getting some attention. Somewhat related,
| Healthcare startups are struggling with this because the
| standards they have to comply with (for developing medical
| software) cost up to 280 EUR (for a pdf!). [1]
|
| One common workaround is to go to "the Estonian site" which
| offers the same, English version of standards for a much lower
| price [2]. Being a bit cynical, I would say that Estonia
| prioritises open information much more highly than.. other
| developed countries. I created a price comparison on my website
| [3].
|
| But: The core problem of standards being openly available is
| still not solved. Why is this not possible? For me, standards are
| very comparable to the law: A large number of people should
| comply with it. For that, they must be openly available to
| everyone. Everything else doesn't make sense. Is that
| unreasonable?
|
| [1] https://www.iso.org/standard/38421.html [2]
| https://www.evs.ee/en/ [3] https://openregulatory.com/accessing-
| standards/
| ironmagma wrote:
| Luckily, FHIR exists is an open healthcare standard which gives
| it an advantage. (Disclosure: I work at Commure which uses it.)
| wk_end wrote:
| Very much in favour of open standards on principle, but is a
| few hundred EUR really an obstacle for any kind of serious
| medical startup?
| olieidel wrote:
| It is:
|
| - You need to purchase multiple standards (at least 4).
|
| - In theory, you need to purchase a multi-user license if
| more than one person should be allowed to read the pdf in
| your company (hint: nobody purchases the multi-user license).
|
| - Every few years, new versions of the standards are released
| which you have to purchase.
|
| - Sometimes, you just purchase standards to realise that
| they're not applicable to your company.
|
| - The industry is riddled with shadiness: A German standards
| web shop offers a "standards flatrate" for a "great price" of
| e.g. 750 EUR for 10 standards. [1]
|
| - Getting off-topic, but more related shadiness: Your
| purchased PDFs are watermarked with your company name and
| full name of purchaser (!) in the footer of each page to
| prevent sharing.
|
| [1] https://www.beuth.de/de/regelwerke/normen-flatrates-im-
| ueber...
| edflsafoiewq wrote:
| Especially compared to the cost of reading and complying with
| them.
| pretendgeneer wrote:
| The problem is not just a few hundred EUR if that standard is
| your core business, it's the 10's-100's that are roughly
| adjacent that if they were free you would just have on hand
| and use/adopt if it makes sense, but to have a price
| gatekeeper means you have to think about every single
| standard that might make sense to follow.
| oauea wrote:
| It's not just one document. And you don't know what will be
| relevant before you buy them, because you won't know the
| contents!
| ballenf wrote:
| ICD code licensing is highway robbery. I would guess most
| health tech startups also need those.
|
| And those prices look reasonable compared to drug database
| license costs.
|
| And the real killer is meaningful use certification.
|
| The whole field seems engineered to prevent competition.
|
| So while ISO costs are unjustifiable, they're a pittance
| compared to other compliance costs that most in the field
| will encounter.
| btilly wrote:
| _The whole field seems engineered to prevent
| competition._
|
| It is. After all it is not in the interests of anyone who
| is established in the field to make competition easy.
| jtwaleson wrote:
| The fact that the content is copyrighted and can't be
| publicly discussed is the main issue.
| nl wrote:
| That's not what copyright is at all.
|
| Copyright might restrict reposting parts, but nothing
| (except perhaps license agreements) restricts public
| discussion.
|
| You can see this by the fact that Wikipedia has complete
| details of the ISO date standard (as referenced in the
| parent tweet Tim replied to).
| unethical_ban wrote:
| When ISO is defacto law in some industries, I would argue
| that laws should not be paywalled.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| Your comment reminds me of related thing, with building
| codes in the US. The Supreme Court recently ruled they
| could not be copyrighted, for the reasons you say, they are
| laws that need to be available.
|
| These codes are often produced by a single organization,
| "International Code Council", a non-profit somewhat
| analagous to ISO, which I believe sells them to
| governmental jurisidictions which adopt them as law,
| sometimes with some customizations or "choose A or B"
| choices.
|
| One of the parties to the lawsuits involved happens to be a
| Y Combinator funded company, "UpCodes".
|
| https://archinect.com/news/article/150195411/supreme-
| court-r...
|
| https://www.constructiondive.com/news/construction-code-
| purv...
|
| https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/16/a-court-decision-in-
| favor-...
|
| In the US, if there are any cases where an ISO code is
| mentioned in law as legally binding in some way, it's
| possible someone could try to challenge the ability to keep
| from sharing the relevant standard text freely. It's not
| exactly the same situation, but this supreme court decision
| provides a possible path anyway.
| jsmith45 wrote:
| That is a severe overstatement.
|
| The Supreme Court ruled in Georgia vs
| public.resource.org, which was very much not about
| building codes. P.R.Org actually does have another
| ongoing lawsuit that is similar to UpCode's: American
| Society for Testing and Materials et al. v.
| Public.Resource.Org
|
| The UpCode ruling was at the district court level, and
| merely cited the ruling from Georgia vs
| public.resource.org.
|
| Until we get at least appellate level decisions on the
| copyrightability of enacted codes, I'm unlikely to feel
| satisfied.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| Hm, thanks for correction. I'm definitely not an expert.
| I just vaguely remembered that it was something that was
| at one point being legally challenged, so looked it up
| and found those articles, with headlines including:
|
| "Supreme Court rules that building codes cannot be
| copyrighted"
|
| "Construction code purveyor calls Supreme Court's ruling
| that annotated code can't be copyrighted 'monumental'"
|
| Are you saying those headlines were overstating?
| skissane wrote:
| > These codes are often produced by a single
| organization, "International Code Council"
|
| Somewhat off-topic, but I've never quite understood the
| American tendency to call something the "International X"
| when the US is only the country of any significance
| involved in it.
|
| (It may be technically true that a handful of small
| countries have adopted the US building code - such as
| Bermuda or Western Samoa. But that doesn't change its
| status as an essentially American code. The US is the
| only major economy to use it, and non-US entities have
| very minimal, if any, input on its contents. And a few
| small countries might have adopted the US building code
| even if it was called "US" rather than "International".)
| AYBABTME wrote:
| Marketing.
| lathiat wrote:
| Same problem with the building standards in Australia.
|
| Same problem in Australia with the AS/NZS standards. I've
| been having problems with my whiteset plaster, which is
| like a liquid applied white plaster surface used on
| almost every home here in Western Australia. Mine was
| done incorrectly, I had to purchase two different $250
| standards to understand how it was done wrong, how it
| should behave, how it was tested, in order to file a
| complaint. It may not surprise you part of the reason it
| was applied incorrectly is because not every trade has a
| copy of said standard.
|
| And then even once you purchase it, it's a "one user"
| watermarked PDF you're supposed to only have 1 copy of
| and there's lots of harsh warnings about that, so even
| those that have it and scared to run around with it.
|
| It's a crazy situation. Because this is legislated stuff
| for building. As a consumer it's very expensive to inform
| yourself on these things. If you wanted to inform
| yourself on all aspects of a build it would get expensive
| fast.
|
| It's also difficult for me to publish and discuss this
| information in the public domain to help other consumers
| having the same problem, as the limits of how much text I
| can "copy" appears technically set at 0 even though it's
| standard to "reference" it. But it's very easy to mis-
| interpret the standard if you don't read things in
| context.
|
| If the standards are effectively government legislated
| they either need to be government funded (this makes
| total sense to me) or the price needs to be much more
| token, 10 dollars, with much less draconian access. But
| at that price the government may as well fund it anyway.
| Dave_TRS wrote:
| If anyone is interested, below is a relevant portion of
| the court's analysis from the Up.Codes case in the
| original document linked to at the end of the Techcrunch
| article above. They lay out criteria by which a
| copyrighted work is considered "the law", giving the
| public free access to it:
|
| "the principles that guide the Court's analysis seem
| relatively clear. The law is in the public domain, and
| the public must be afforded free access to it. SeePRO,
| 140 S.Ct. at1507. That a law references a privately-
| authored, copyrighted work does not necessarily make that
| work "the law," such that the public needs free access to
| the work. CCC, 44 F.3d at 74. However, a privately-
| authored work may "become the law" upon substantial
| government adoption in limited circumstances, based on
| considerations including (1) whether the private author
| intended or encouraged the work's adoption into law; (2)
| whether the work comprehensively governs public conduct,
| such that it resembles a "law of general applicability";
| (3) whether the work expressly regulates a broad area of
| private endeavor;(4) whether the work provides penalties
| or sanctions for violation of its contents; and (5)
| whether the alleged infringer has published and
| identified the work as part of the law, rather than the
| copyrighted material underlying the law."
| switch007 wrote:
| I know European funding has its issues but is a few hundred
| Euro that bad?
| drspacemonkey wrote:
| For one or two standards? There's just the headache of
| getting approval to spend the money.
|
| But when it gets to dozens/hundreds, plus requiring vendors
| to have their own copies, it quickly multiplies into a
| massive burden. And that's not even getting into the open
| source issues.
|
| Not to mention the fact that you might not know if you NEED
| the ISO until after you've already bought it.
| korijn wrote:
| ISO standards commonly refer to other standards for more
| details. Then you also need technical reports which are also
| pay walled to get a sense of practical application. It very
| quickly adds up and there is no way to "explore" which
| documents are really applicable to your company and products.
|
| And to top it off most of these licenses under which you buy
| them only allow for a single digital copy (one person).
| babayega2 wrote:
| As mentioned above, if it few $524 per document, and you
| don't know how many documents you will need to consult in
| order to comply with the standards and at the end you need to
| buy the relevant document ... It's tricky. Standards are like
| laws. The law shouldn't be pay-walled.
| linksbro wrote:
| It's incredible to learn from the responses in this thread how
| widespread and systemic this problem is, not just in software
| but seemingly every industry. Thank you for these examples.
| jtwaleson wrote:
| I fully agree
| munk-a wrote:
| I am a rather seasoned database person at this point, but when I
| wasn't - when I was just getting into database interactions - I
| had an academic background in relational algebra and I knew that
| SQL was the main communication language. For day to day work this
| was fine but at one point I was tasked with making our
| application DBMS neutral with support for running on top of
| SQLServer (TSQL), PostgreSQL, and MySQL. My first thought when
| coming to this problem was, well, let's take a good look at the
| grand daddy doco so I attempted to find the SQL standard.
|
| It disappoints me that, to this day, the best reference for pure
| SQL out there are the postgres docs, postgres is actually pretty
| good about calling out non-compliances so you can get a really
| good grounding of what code is likely to be cross platform
| compatible.
|
| I 100% agree with Tim Sweeney's sentiment. ISO are terrible at
| their job.
| [deleted]
| yakubin wrote:
| Aside from obstructing access, ISO produces really low-quality
| standards. The prose alone leaves much to be desired in terms of
| clarity and concision. Knowing that, I'm relieved each time I am
| to deal with an IETF standard instead, which wins on both fronts
| (quality and access).
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Aside from obstructing access, ISO produces really low-
| quality standards.
|
| Low-quality standards are themselves an access issue, and I
| think are reinforced by the paid-access rule, since that means
| the people reading the standards are a narrower group who is
| more specialized in dealing with ISO standards, who are more
| prone to become blind to "that's just the way ISO standards
| are".
|
| ANSI (also paid access) standards such as the whole ASC X-12
| suite widely used in industry and a portion of which is
| mandated federally for healthcare under HIPAA are a complete
| nightmare mess, too. (And it doesn't help that not only are
| they paid-access standards, but they often incorporate by
| reference literally hundreds of other, largely paid access,
| standards from other bodies, some of which have become obsolete
| and are no longer available when the standard referencing them
| remains mandated.)
| peterlk wrote:
| If there is anyone on earth who could reinvent the internet, it
| is Tim Sweeney. The metaverse is coming, and it will exist
| because of him. Think I'm being hyperbolic? Go listen to his
| SigGraph 2019 talk
| zepto wrote:
| It will obviously not 'exist because of him'.
|
| It wasn't his idea, and thousands of people have worked on the
| technologies to enable it, and he's not even the only
| billionaire with a company who is working on such a thing.
|
| For the most part I see him complaining about people impeding
| him, rather than just solving the problems with his own
| resources.
| aargh_aargh wrote:
| Saving you a click... since I, for one, had no idea who Tim
| Sweeney was.
|
| "Timothy Dean Sweeney (born 1970)[4] is an American video game
| programmer, businessman and conservationist, known as the
| founder and CEO of Epic Games and as the creator of the Unreal
| Engine, a game development platform."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Sweeney_%28game_developer%...
|
| "Tune in to hear Tim Sweeney (founder and CEO, Epic Games)
| during his SIGGRAPH 2019 Talk, "THRIVE: Foundational Principles
| & Technologies for the Metaverse." You'll hear Sweeney posit
| the state of the games industry, the rise of creator-centric
| and social gaming, what the "metaverse" really is, and what it
| will take to build the medium on a larger scale."
|
| https://blog.siggraph.org/2019/10/siggraph-spotlight-episode...
| leoedin wrote:
| The price of standards makes me angry. They're essentially a form
| of legislation in many countries - to sell anything in the EU you
| have to comply with the relevant safety standards. Yet they're
| kept under lock and key - to read the rules which you need to
| follow to sell something in your own country, you need to pay a
| 3rd party hundreds of Euros.
|
| And when you read the standards, they reference other standards.
| Eventually you have to build a graph of standards to which you
| must comply, each one costing hundreds of Euros. It's a complete
| racket.
|
| The worst thing is that the standards themselves tend to be
| written by 3rd party organisations with an interest in that
| domain, so they have a strong incentive to make the standard
| match with whatever they're doing. So not only does a new startup
| have to spend months reading hugely expensive dry safety
| standards, you also have to build something which is essentially
| a worse version of the incumbents.
| leipert wrote:
| I wonder whether it is worth to employ a student just for
| getting access to Standards / Papers via their university.
| (Back when I was at a technical University we could access that
| via our student logins)
|
| That way you might explore which standards are necessary and
| buy them if need-be.
|
| edit: Obviously I would advocate for open and free standards.
| kaliszad wrote:
| Yes, it is a big problem and a very good business for some
| firms. I have 2nd hand experience with that thanks to my
| closest family. There is a partial workaround using a public or
| university library, which at least in Germany and most likely
| other European countries, seems to work. They tend to have many
| standards available and they can usually order more if you ask
| politely. At least bigger central libraries or those connected
| to a big university shouldn't have an issue with that. Of
| course, even so you may have to buy a standard (licence)
| because of the licence part. At least you know, what it
| contains before you think about buying the licence. It may be,
| you don't actually need the licence at all or can reduce the
| amount of the total licences you need.
| lathiat wrote:
| Same problem in Australia with the AS/NZS standards. I've been
| having problems with my whiteset plaster, which is like a
| liquid applied white plaster surface used on almost every home
| here in Western Australia.
|
| Mine was done incorrectly, I had to purchase two different $250
| standards to understand how it was done wrong, how it should
| behave, how it was tested, in order to file a complaint. It may
| not surprise you part of the reason it was applied incorrectly
| is because not every trade has a copy of said standard.
|
| And then even once you purchase it, it's a "one user"
| watermarked PDF you're supposed to only have 1 copy of and
| there's lots of harsh warnings about that, so even those that
| have it and scared to run around with it.
|
| It's a crazy situation. Because this is legislated stuff for
| building. As a consumer it's very expensive to inform yourself
| on these things. If you wanted to inform yourself on all
| aspects of a build it would get expensive fast.
|
| It's also difficult for me to publish and discuss this
| information in the public domain to help other consumers having
| the same problem, as the limits of how much text I can "copy"
| appears technically set at 0 even though it's standard to
| "reference" it. But it's very easy to mis-interpret the
| standard if you don't read things in context.
|
| If the standards are effectively government legislated they
| either need to be government funded (this makes total sense to
| me) or the price needs to be much more token, 10 dollars, with
| much less draconian access. But at that price the government
| may as well fund it anyway.
| neuroma wrote:
| Agree with all you say. Apparently people sometimes put ISO
| documents on libgen, potentially saving the expense.
| Faaak wrote:
| Sometimes even, the standard is split into different norms. For
| example, the EV charging cable is defined in EC 62196-{1..6}.
| Which in turn address other standards. So you finally need to by
| at least 10 PDFs to understand the darn thing..
| mleonhard wrote:
| IETF works around ISO's paywall by including necessary info in
| their free RFCs. For example, TLS uses X.509 certificates which
| use "ASN.1 object identifier" numbers from a non-free ISO/IEC/ITU
| document [0] [1]. IETF includes the required and optional numbers
| in the appendix of their free RFC on X.509 [2].
|
| [0] https://www.iso.org/standard/80321.html
|
| [1] https://www.itu.int/rec/T-REC-X.520
|
| [2] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5280#section-4.1.2.4
| plankers wrote:
| There's something beautiful about watching a billionaire (or
| almost one) tell the ISO Central Secretariat "That's dumb."
| 3np wrote:
| What does their bank account have to do with anything...?
| bondolo wrote:
| I am glad that this is getting attention. Open access has been a
| discussed issue for academic journals for some time already but
| the locked down access for standards has received little
| attention. In addition to ISO the IEEE, SAE, NMEA all have their
| standards behind paywalls. Even ASN.1 was for many years, long
| after it was adopted for the RSA PKCS standards, a paywalled
| standard. This is incredibly frustrating.
|
| I remember sending cheques to "Global Engineering Documents" in
| Englewood Colorado to get printed copies of various standards
| back in the 1990s and hoping that would die with the advent of
| the Internet and the possibility of cheaply distributing
| information. It was understandable in the world of paper that if
| you wanted some obscure technical document that it was expensive.
| They retained the publishing model but eliminated the reason it
| was expensive.
|
| It has been encouraging that people like Carl Malamud have been
| working at making various aspects of our laws, regulations and
| standards public but more work is needed.
|
| Some of my tweets over the years on the topic of open access
| standards:
|
| "I am really thrilled by sudden attention on paywalled standards.
| Current model hurts standardization. So how about it @SAEIntl,
| @IEEESA, @NMEA_org, @isostandards, @ITUstandards will you join
| the 21st century and move to free open access standards?
| Alternative is your irrelevancy."
| https://twitter.com/mjduigou/status/1369033695030513670
|
| "It annoys me that the IEEE standard for publishing test results
| probably won't be adopted by software industry because it is
| behind a fricking paywall
| https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8662798"
| https://twitter.com/mjduigou/status/1273718847497887744
|
| "I don't like that @IEEESA or @SAEIntl put their standards behind
| paywalls. Whatever revenue this publishing model makes is grossly
| offset by the impairment to, you know, standardization."
| https://twitter.com/mjduigou/status/1308889681187221505
|
| "How many bullshit encodings have been created since 1984 because
| ASN.1 wasn't a freely available standard? Not that it is perfect
| but SO MUCH PAIN could have been avoided if there had been
| community adoption. That adoption didn't happen because it was
| not an open access standard."
| https://twitter.com/mjduigou/status/1308892326098546691
|
| "Free the codes!
| https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/publicresource/public-s...
| Only slightly worse than patent trolls are public standards
| behind paywalls."
| https://twitter.com/mjduigou/status/384767046753320962
| LockAndLol wrote:
| Is there going to be a scihub for specs? Spechub? This seems to
| be the build IP towards that.
| aejnsn wrote:
| I have had the hardest time with getting other developers to
| understand standards because of this. If the standards are walled
| off in some privileged access, how can the public, or users
| thereof, understand, much less contribute to said standards?
| There has to be a better mechanism.
| curtis3389 wrote:
| Even if you get past the paywall, you'll be presented with
| incredibly obtuse standards.
|
| I tried to use ISO 1016 for writing a software design doc with
| some success, but it was like pulling teeth.
|
| First, you needed multiple ISO dictionaries to find out what half
| the words are referring to, and even then things are ill-defined.
|
| For example, one of the required sections in an ISO SDD is the
| Context, but nowhere is context defined or described.
|
| The standards just seem like a web of academic garbage with no
| connection to reality.
|
| Woe to anyone that must implement them as part of their job.
| SloopJon wrote:
| The posted link took me straight to Tim's tweet, so I didn't
| realize at first that he was replying to @isostandards:
|
| > Hello, unfortunately, the ISO Central Secretariat does not
| provide free copies of standards. All ISO Publications derive
| from the work and contributions of ISO and ISO Members that
| contain intellectual property of demonstrable economic value.
|
| > For this reason, considering the value of standards, their
| economic and social importance, the costs of their development
| and maintenance, we and all ISO Members have the interest to
| protect the value of ISO Publications and National Adoptions, not
| making them publicly available.
|
| The ISO standard that I have the most experience with is ISO/IEC
| 9899:1990, aka C90. Part of the reason for that, of course, is
| that I had a used copy of Herbert Schildt's _Annotated ANSI C
| Standard_ ; it's also a considerably smaller standard than, say,
| SQL or C++.
|
| I'm of mixed minds as to the value of the C standard. There is
| certainly value in having _a_ standard. After sufficient study
| and deliberation, you can usually determine whether an input
| program or compiler implementation is standards conforming. When
| I compare the evolution of C and C++ to say, Python and Rust, I
| have trouble pointing to the specific value that ISO adds.
|
| This isn't really a fair comparison, because the difference
| between C/C++ and Python/Rust isn't just the process, but the end
| result. I judge C and C++ not just by ISO's efforts, but by those
| of Microsoft, IBM, GNU, LLVM, etc. Python and Rust, meanwhile,
| ship a working reference implementation, and do a pretty good job
| of it. Rust has improved quite a bit six weeks at a time. C
| standards, meanwhile, ship closer to every decade. Even the new
| rapid pace of C++ is every three years.
| ak217 wrote:
| Aside from Tim making very good points, ISO-8601 is not a good
| standard - it tries to specify too many formats and ends up being
| so flexible that full compliance is rare. RFC 3339 is an open
| standard and is much simpler and more practical.
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| I do think ISO 8601:2004, which is now ISO 8601-1:2019, is a
| reasonable standard. It never tried to become a computer data
| type and/or format standard; it is a simple extension to human-
| readable date and time format modulo ambiguity. Even infrequent
| formats like intervals are not complex and can be easily
| learned. By comparison RFC 3339 only covers a very specific use
| case (which is the internet protocol), and if we had only RFC
| 3339 but not ISO 8601 we will still be fighting over mdy vs.
| dmy vs. ymd order for human-readable dates. The only problem
| with ISO 8601 is, well, it is not openly available and Tim is
| very right about that.
|
| ISO 8601-2:2019 [1] is however a complete mess. It is too
| complex for human consumption and too ambiguous for computing
| uses. I argue that it should be shelved as soon as possible.
|
| [1]
| https://web.archive.org/web/20171020000043/https://www.loc.g...
| (draft standard)
| wongarsu wrote:
| > ISO 8601-2:2019 [1] is however a complete mess
|
| Wow, you weren't joking.
|
| It introduces things like "?2015-?02-31" (year and month are
| uncertain, day is known), which may be abbreviated as
| "2015-02?-31". 'The character '?' (question mark) is used to
| mean "uncertain". The character '~' (tilde) is used to mean
| "approximate". The character '%' (percent) is used to mean
| "both uncertain and approximate".'
|
| There's also "1950S2" (2 significant digits, so a year
| between 1900 and 1999, estimated as 1950). You could also
| write 19XX, though that has a slightly different meaning
| (leaving the last two digits unspecified).
|
| There are special "month" values to denote other divisions of
| a year. "2001-21" is spring of 2001, 2001-22 is summer,
| 2001-33 is the first quarter.
|
| "R/20150104T083000/PM15S00/FREQ=YR;INTR=2;BYMO=1;BYDA=SU;BYHO
| =8,9;BYMIN=30" is a fifteen minute time interval every Sunday
| in January at 8:30:00 AM and 9:30:00 AM, every other year
| wheybags wrote:
| Genuinely curious to hear the supposed use case for this
| stuff from the original author.
| guitarbill wrote:
| You're not wrong, but unfortunately a lot of libraries call it
| ISO 8601, and not RFC 3339. I think a lot of people probably
| mean RFC 3339 when they say ISO 8601 (myself included for a
| long time).
| nwhatt wrote:
| Healthcare has long been the same way, HL7 was paywalled
| ($1000+/yr membership until 2012).X12 is still in the thousands
| for membership.
| dj_mc_merlin wrote:
| I was not aware people buy ISOs at all. I thought everyone
| pirated them and only companies paid the actual price, same as
| with software licenses.
| Kranar wrote:
| I can't speak about the ISO as a whole for engineering fields,
| but the ISO standardization process has worked out horribly for
| the C++ community. Not only for the issues Tim Sweeney points
| out, but the entire C++ standardization process is defacto a
| closed-off and secretive process where participation is limited
| to those who can physically travel from place to place and it's
| painfully obvious that the quality of features in C++ are much
| lower than what they could have been otherwise.
|
| A common claim made by the ISO C++ committee regarding criticism
| of the language is that these guys are volunteers working in a
| mostly unpaid capacity on the language, and often have to hit
| tight deadlines to have any shot at getting a feature into the
| standard, and that's true exactly because of how arcane the ISO
| standardization process is. It's this pseudo-antagonistic process
| where maybe one or two individuals are tasked to "champion" a
| paper in front of their peers and then everyone is supposed to
| pretend that there's no politics involved and that the paper gets
| approved entirely on its technical merit.
|
| C++ would have been much better served from ditching that and
| doing what Java, Python, and Rust do, have broad community
| feedback and input. It's hard to imagine what beneficial features
| are in C++ that would not still be there had there been
| involvement from the broader community of game developers,
| embedded device developers, desktop software developers and a
| host of people who use the language regularly, but it's clear
| many clumsy and awkward features would have been eliminated,
| including the now 50 ways of initializing variables, broken
| standard library features like std::variant, the now unusable
| std::regex, the minefield that is std::random, the upcoming
| bloated and error prone std::ranges, it's no wonder many C++
| development teams are skeptical of the utility of the standard
| library and just roll their own alternatives.
|
| I hope no other language goes down the road of using ISO to
| standardize its language.
| initplus wrote:
| One of the biggest impediments caused by the C++ standards
| committee is the tight scope of the standard. Anything outside
| of the language/library spec is entirely outside the realm of
| standardization.
|
| So any tooling improvements (dependency management, build
| process) are not able to be made to the language. Fractured
| solutions harm adoption, languages with good dependency
| management and good build processes have one solution they push
| on everyone.
| deckard1 wrote:
| C++ at least had the benefit of industry and OOP trend behind
| it. It was rather fortunate in this case.
|
| I've argued elsewhere on HN that Common Lisp died because they
| were closed and secretive at the exact moment they needed to go
| the opposite route.
|
| https://www.cs.cmu.edu/Groups/AI/html/faqs/lang/lisp/part4/f...
|
| Around 2004, Lisp was having a bit of a revival of sorts. Lisp
| was becoming trendy, various blogs and web sites were created.
| But the only documentation you could find was the HyperSpec.
| Which, as anyone that had the misfortune of reading, is _awful_
| as a reference. It 's both too technical for casual software
| developers and not official enough for language implementers.
| There were two free, open source Lisps available (CMUCL, CLISP)
| and both were rather unloved and clunky at best.
|
| Even Linus had a bit of trouble getting his hands on POSIX
| standards. Imagine Linux dying because it couldn't follow
| standards that Linus could not acquire.
|
| By the mid-to-late '90s the writing was already on the wall.
| Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby followed no standard. It became common
| for the free implementation to _be_ the standard.
|
| Clojure arrived and largely filled the Lisp void. Racket
| attempted a similar movement, by renaming itself from PLT
| Scheme to something that removes the emphasis on any particular
| standard. If you want Lisp today, though, you're probably doing
| Clojure.
| varjag wrote:
| C++ was pretty horrible prior to C++98 as well (and likely 33
| out of 50 ways to initialize a variable already existed by
| then). It did improve considerably within the past decade under
| the auspices of the committee.
| slezyr wrote:
| std::string has been in C++98, however, you couldn't use it
| to create a std::ifstream as it had only char* constructor.
|
| It took a decade to add a std::string constructor...
| nraynaud wrote:
| I would at least start by distributing for free all standards
| targeted by a legislation.
|
| Because those suckers cross-reference each other like crazy, a
| standard can have only a few paragraphs of useful content (and
| pages and pages of legaleeze and revision management around).
| ketamine__ wrote:
| Seems a bit dramatic.
| vernie wrote:
| The Fortnite money printer has made it possible for Sweeney to
| tilt at as many windmills as he likes.
| moonbug wrote:
| this dude needs to learn about libraries.
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| What library contains copies of ISO standards?
| moonbug wrote:
| I guess you do too.
| gjvnq wrote:
| University libraries
| gred wrote:
| Can we frame this as an equity or social justice issue, so that
| we can leverage the social media MaaS (Mob as a Service)
| infrastructure to effect change?
| camdenlock wrote:
| I haven't seen anyone ask this question yet: do we LOSE anything
| by removing these fees? Does the incentive structure change in
| any meaningful way? i.e. do we need these fees in order to
| incentivize the production of quality standards?
|
| I agree that the fees seem like annoying gatekeepers, and
| antithetical to the purpose of standards. But if we remove them,
| where do the economic incentives come from?
| s1mon wrote:
| It's not just the ISO. ASME (American Society of Mechanical
| Engineers), IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission), PIA
| (Plastics Industry Association), etc. all have standards which
| they are supposedly trying to promulgate. There are a few
| standards that I've needed professionally which are freely
| available: the USB specs and the MIDI specs.
| https://usb.org/documents https://www.midi.org/specifications
|
| When specifications needed to be printed and shipped, I
| understand that costs money, but electronic standards should be
| very low to zero cost to download.
|
| I did find that DIN (Deutsche Institut fur Normung or German
| Institute for Standardisation) is starting to publish some of
| their standards for free. https://www.din.de/en/din-and-our-
| partners/press/press-relea...
|
| In the US, anything that is published by the government is
| supposed to be free of copyright.
| https://www.govinfo.gov/about/policies
| robmccoll wrote:
| Private standards are also how you end up with a variety of
| implementations that are all non-conforming in their own subtle
| ways. Some because the authors didn't have access and were
| attempting to do the best they could with documentation from
| other implementations, third party articles, and reverse
| engineering. Some because the authors have the standards, but the
| consumers of their products don't and won't hold the authors
| accountable since they don't know how it is really supposed to
| work anyway. Others because they think there is competitive
| advantage in deviating from the standard.
|
| It's hard enough getting consistent behavior out multiple
| implementations of the same public standards.
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| I was certain that the Ada language spec - an ISO standard - was
| made freely available. I was mistaken. They only make an old
| version freely available. [0]
|
| I get the impression the standardisation of Ada has been broadly
| successful in providing assurance of conformity, [1] but that
| still doesn't excuse paywalling the document.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_8652
|
| [1] https://www.adaic.org/ada-
| resources/standards/ada-95-documen...
| ndesaulniers wrote:
| Yep, hence GNU C extensions. Many are good and solve deficiencies
| in the language. I wish there was more collaboration between
| implementations before any became widespread in use, but I can
| appreciate avoiding design by committee.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| This is the engineering equivalent of scientific journals.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Yes, which is why so many standards are not ISO.
|
| Some are, to be certain. Especially standards where a lot of
| money is riding on all the adopters agreeing on compliance, so
| there's a certain benefit to the "money where your mouth is"
| aspect of the service ISO provides.
|
| But plenty of highly influential standards are not ISO.
| j1elo wrote:
| I see a nice parallelism with the concept of OSS. All these
| paywalled standards are like closed source software, in the sense
| that they are not created under terms that ultimately protect the
| freedoms of final consumers (those who end up reading the PDF).
|
| The ISO business model is creating something (standards) and then
| profiting from their distribution.
| Rapzid wrote:
| I went to make a SQL to AST parser; was absolutely shocked to
| discover you had to purchase the SQL standard.
| yehButEpic8 wrote:
| Dear Tim Sweeney,
|
| Get together with Unity and open source your engines so we can
| drive towards a standard.
|
| What's actually interesting is content. Why should we developers
| be locked into walled gardens?
|
| Thanks
| tuke wrote:
| This has bugged me for a long time.
|
| My company complies with HITRUST. Many of the HITRUST controls
| are syntheses of controls found in NIST, ISO, and other
| organizations.
|
| In some cases, I want to know where a HITRUST control comes from:
| But since I can't look at ISO without paying, I am blocked from
| understanding the provenance of some HITRUST controls.
|
| I don't like that.
| not_knuth wrote:
| I vaguely remember ISO wanting to make their standards freely
| available a couple of years back, but the BSI (British Standards
| Institute) blocking the move, because it conflicted with _their_
| business model.
|
| I can't find a reference to it though and it was only briefly
| announced during an ISO meeting. Is there someone from ISO who
| can back this up?
| smitop wrote:
| Recently I was curious as to how the wireless emergency alert
| systems work. But the actual specifications [1] from ATIS
| (another standardisation body) that carriers are required to
| implement are paywalled with ridiculous prices. $145 for a 35
| page PDF is way too much, and makes the whole system way less
| transparent.
|
| [1] e.g.
| https://www.techstreet.com/standards/atis-0700036-v002?produ...
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