26 ms·

“ISO obstructs adoption of standards by paywalling them”

• rdpintqogeogsaa 6y ago
  > 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.
  • NHQ 6y ago
    Standards should be myriad and have benchmarks.
  • boarnoah 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      In principle, people participate in the IETF as individuals, though in practice it matters who they are employed by.
  • SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      The only bits people actually know are yyyy-mm-dd and pre-92 implicit joins.
    • munk-a 6y ago
      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 6y ago
        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.
  • brian-armstrong 6y ago
    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.
  • linksbro 6y ago
    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/ http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode13.0.0/ [2] https://home.unicode.org/membership/why-join/ https://home.unicode.org/membership/why-join/
    • Mindless2112 6y ago
      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.
      • RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
        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 6y ago
          [deleted]
      • 1f60c 6y ago
        I think "ECMA C#" lags behind C# as implemented in .NET, but still.
      • leowbattle 6y ago
        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 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.
  • dblohm7 6y ago
    > 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 6y ago
      > 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.)
  • s17n 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      ISO deals with way more than just C++ and SQL.
      • s17n 6y ago
        I'm guessing that those parts of what ISO does aren't what Tim Sweeney had in mind - he specifically called out C++ in the tweet.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • bombcar 6y ago
      POSIX is mandated by government contracts - and so are many other things. If you’re selling into governments you need to be able to sign off that you comply with the appropriate standards (whatever the government wants - usually a standard written by the vendor they want to choose)..
      • passivate 6y ago
        One of the things with government regs that I've learnt working in biotech is that access to the document(s) isn't enough. There are various nuances with the interpretation, and only someone well versed and experienced in them can prepare you for an audit. Our company pays top-dollar for these consultants.
  • dragonwriter 6y ago
    > 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.
  • oezi 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      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.
      • cma 6y ago
        Binding legal precedent is often paywalled to read too.
      • ngrilly 6y ago
        Not in France. Everything is publicly accessible on Legifrance.gouv.fr.
        • phlo 6y ago
          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.
  • cushychicken 6y ago
    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 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      > 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???
  • chrismcb 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      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.
  • hrktb 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      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.
  • ngrilly 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      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 6y ago
        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.
  • inetknght 6y ago
    > 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 6y ago
      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 6y ago
        Actually, hobbyist programmers often create what become competing standards to the ISO track one resulting in low adoption of the ISO standard.
      • inetknght 6y ago
        I see and I agree with you -- I had misinterpreted the parent post.
  • onion2k 6y ago
    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.
    • MaulingMonkey 6y ago
      It also includes people wanting to write standards-compliant code, and even "people who want to contribute to compilers." The closed nature of the standard means secondary sources dominate my search index. A previous rant about how the entire internet fails to warn you that atoi("a"); is undefined behavior: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14861917 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14861917 I've contributed a few patches to rustc, shipped multiple C++ projects, and even technically submitted a patch to LLVM. I've got a copy of the C++03 standard... but even I haven't rushed out to empty my pocketbook for C++11, C++14, C++17, and C++20, despite using them.
  • estaseuropano 6y ago
    Standards cost money because the process to create them costs money. Sometimes governments, big companies or organisations like the EU fund standard development, these then end up freely accessible. That said, it really shouldn't be this way.
    • erik_seaberg 6y ago
      One copy of a book has value by itself. But a standard needs everyone to follow it, so a business model that shrinks the audience is self-defeating.
    • ixfo 6y ago
      It really should be that way - i.e. we agree that standards are a net good (and I don't think anyone would argue otherwise) for industry and society, so make them free at the point of use and fund their development through government. This removes any commercial incentives that may result in regulatory capture - a big issue in some areas - and should (if implemented properly) drive investment in strategically sensible areas. The profit that most national/international standards bodies just about covers costs, but none of these bodies are particularly expensive to operate in the grand scheme of things. Some already get partial funding from govts. Full funding is clearly the sensible model.
    • Anechoic 6y ago
      Standards cost money because the process to create them costs money. But the money you pay to the standards doesn't go to the creators, it goes to the organization to make them available. (I've contributed to ANSI standards).
    • lonjil 6y ago
      The people who make the standards do not get any money from you buying a copy of the standard.
  • arp242 6y ago
    I recently wanted to get the list of countries and provinces/regions (ISO 3166); this codifies things like "US" for United States and "US-TX" for Texas. It's ridiculously hard to find this data. Sure, there are lists floating out there on the 'net, but many of them are incomplete, outdated, or borked in various ways. I eventually ended up writing a script to extract it from the Maxmind GeoDB files, which was the best source I could find. I think I spent half a day on this on total: trying to find a good list, examining the lists I found and discovering they weren't good, I wrote a script to extract this from another source (some US gov't agency, I forgot which) only to discover there were problems with that data as well (it dropped diacritics IIRC), etc. This is the simplest possible ISO standard, and a 10-minute job ballooned to this. In hindsight it almost would have been better to just pay the €200 or whatever it is, but bugger if I'm going to shell out that kind of money for a fairly small hobby project.
    • bombcar 6y ago
      What’s insane is that’s literally a list of data - uncopyrightable in the US. Did you make your results available?
      • arp242 6y ago
        I thought about it, and even have a ~/code/iso-3166-2 directory with some stuff in it, but the problem is that I'm not entire sure how accurate/complete this data is either. It's certainly enough for my use case as it's specifically tied to GeoIP, but it's not inconceivable that there are missing entries (or outdated/wrong ones, for that matter). Perhaps there are regions which don't have an IP address in the GeoIP database (like some of the small pacific island states)? I don't know... ISO does have a browsable website[1] and you can get the data from there, which is the best "official" source I know of, but it's not easy to extract the list from there. It's probably better to shell out the €80 (less than the €200 I remembered) to just buy the damn PDF than spend a day writing a script to extract the data from there, but I'm kinda poor at the moment, so... :-/ Also no idea if that buys me updates as well (being outdated is a big problem with many of the lists I found, turns out countries change, who knew). Wikipedia also has pages for them[2], but again, I'm not sure how accurate/complete/updated this is. [1]: https://www.iso.org/obp/ui/#search https://www.iso.org/obp/ui/#search (click "country codes", no permalink). [2]: e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-2:ID https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-2:ID
  • m0dest 6y ago
    >Various stakeholders actually participate in standardization efforts and thus also both already know the standard and are able to push it through. And this is exactly the perverse conflict of interest. In those cases, the authors have no interest in actually attracting independent implementations that adopt the specification. The specification is a formality to bolster the credibility of their product or technology. The authors don't want some outside team to read this and actually build something on their own; they want that team to buy their [chip/component/patent license/product/service] that implements this. It's not a solo endeavor. The coauthors and stakeholders tend to be complicit in this game, often as peers in the oligopoly. When a spec author actually wants their specification to be independently implemented, you can tell. They don't make it exclusively for purchase in the dusty basement of the bureaucracy superstore. They put out guides, conformance tests, reference implementations, examples, and tooling. And those materials often do exist for ISO standards... but as expensive, proprietary kits from one of the spec authors, only available to customers who buy their [chip/component/patent license/product/service]. That's part of the business plan. Why write a clear spec and give it away for free when you could be selling one of the only conformant implementations of your Public Standard™?
• peterlk 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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 6y ago
    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%29 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-30-tim-sweeney-and-the-metaverse.html/ https://blog.siggraph.org/2019/10/siggraph-spotlight-episode...
• aejnsn 6y ago
  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 6y ago
  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.
  • gmiller123456 6y ago
    Agree. Usually the parties developing a standard have a incentive to make it difficult for others to implement. They can claim it's open, while still limiting competition. I remember when the first HTTPS spec came out, and me and everyone else were saying how hard it was to follow. And someone from Netscape came out and said the text was "intentionally terse".
• ak217 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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.gov/standards/datetime/ISO_DIS%208601-2.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20171020000043/https://www.loc.g... (draft standard)
    • wongarsu 6y ago
      > 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
• Kranar 6y ago
  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.
  • varjag 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      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...
• ketamine__ 6y ago
  Seems a bit dramatic.
  • vernie 6y ago
    The Fortnite money printer has made it possible for Sweeney to tilt at as many windmills as he likes.
• Rapzid 6y ago
  I went to make a SQL to AST parser; was absolutely shocked to discover you had to purchase the SQL standard.
• bombcar 6y ago
  In a time of vast databases of paywalled scientific papers you're telling me nobody has a collection of ISO standards?
  • Daho0n 6y ago
    Most would likely not even understand them as they are written in the best example of newspeak (from '1984') I have ever seen.
  • oasisbob 6y ago
    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.
  • captn3m0 6y ago
    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.
  • userbinator 6y ago
    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.
• munk-a 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • aesyondu 6y ago
    I was curious where the actual SQL standard document is. With a quick search this is the best I can come up with: Second informal review draft from the accepted answer: http://www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu/~shadow/sql/sql1992.txt http://www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu/~shadow/sql/sql1992.txt Downloadable iso standards (C-f sql) http://www.iso.org/PubliclyAvailableStandards http://www.iso.org/PubliclyAvailableStandards https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1714461/ansi-sql-manual https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1714461/ansi-sql-manual
• moonbug 6y ago
  this dude needs to learn about libraries.
  • colejohnson66 6y ago
    What library contains copies of ISO standards?
    • moonbug 6y ago
      I guess you do too.
    • gjvnq 6y ago
      University libraries
      • CRConrad 6y ago
        And everybody in the world is a student at some university?
• shadowgovt 6y ago
  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.
• smitop 6y ago
  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?product_id=2044512 https://www.techstreet.com/standards/atis-0700036-v002?produ...
• yakubin 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    > 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.)
  • rjsw 6y ago
    ISO doesn't write the text of the standard, that is done by members of the individual Technical Committees and Working Groups. I am currently a member of TC184/SC4 and have also been a member of TC22/SC31.
    • CRConrad 6y ago
      So what is "ISO", if not the sum of its "Technical Committees and Working Groups"? If they write the text of the standard, that means ISO writes the text of the standard.
      • rjsw 6y ago
        Would you claim that Elsevier is the sum of everyone in an University ?
• plankers 6y ago
  There's something beautiful about watching a billionaire (or almost one) tell the ISO Central Secretariat "That's dumb."
  • 3np 6y ago
    What does their bank account have to do with anything...?
• tuke 6y ago
  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.
• Faaak 6y ago
  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..
• dj_mc_merlin 6y ago
  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.
• s1mon 6y ago
  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://usb.org/documents https://www.midi.org/specifications 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 für 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-releases/free-download-of-all-din-spec-pas-documents-at-www-beuth-de-262538 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 https://www.govinfo.gov/about/policies
  • imglorp 6y ago
    And IEEE for important standards like Verilog and VHDL. And ANSI and 3GPP for all kinds of telecom.
  • kuschku 6y ago
    Keep in mind that the DIN is only publishing the DIN SPECs, not the DIN NORMs freely. That's not nearly as good as it sounds.
• leoedin 6y ago
  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.
  • neuroma 6y ago
    Agree with all you say. Apparently people sometimes put ISO documents on libgen, potentially saving the expense.
  • kaliszad 6y ago
    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.
  • leipert 6y ago
    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.
• bondolo 6y ago
  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 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://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8662798" https://twitter.com/mjduigou/status/1273718847497887744 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 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 https://twitter.com/mjduigou/status/1308892326098546691 "Free the codes! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/publicresource/public-safety-codes-of-the-world-stand-up-for-safe 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 https://twitter.com/mjduigou/status/384767046753320962
• robmccoll 6y ago
  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.
• ndesaulniers 6y ago
  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.
• olieidel 6y ago
  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 https://www.iso.org/standard/38421.html [2] https://www.evs.ee/en/ https://www.evs.ee/en/ [3] https://openregulatory.com/accessing-standards/ https://openregulatory.com/accessing-standards/
  • linksbro 6y ago
    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 6y ago
    I fully agree
  • wk_end 6y ago
    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?
    • oauea 6y ago
      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 6y ago
• nwhatt 6y ago
  Healthcare has long been the same way, HL7 was paywalled ($1000+/yr membership until 2012).X12 is still in the thousands for membership.
• yehButEpic8 6y ago
  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
• nraynaud 6y ago
  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).
• SloopJon 6y ago
  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.
• gred 6y ago
  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?
• not_knuth 6y ago
  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?
• ChuckMcM 6y ago
  This is the engineering equivalent of scientific journals.
• j1elo 6y ago
  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.
• mleonhard 6y ago
  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 https://www.iso.org/standard/80321.html [1] https://www.itu.int/rec/T-REC-X.520 https://www.itu.int/rec/T-REC-X.520 [2] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5280#section-4.1.2.4 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5280#section-4.1.2.4
• camdenlock 6y ago
  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?
• LockAndLol 6y ago
  Is there going to be a scihub for specs? Spechub? This seems to be the build IP towards that.
• MaxBarraclough 6y ago
  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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_8652 [1] https://www.adaic.org/ada-resources/standards/ada-95-documents/acaa/ https://www.adaic.org/ada-resources/standards/ada-95-documen...
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• neilv 6y ago
  And you really do need the standard. I implemented the entirety of ISO 8601 years ago (not just the most common 5% that most people are aware of) -- parsing, representation, writing, validation, and arithmetic -- and there's no way I could've guessed some of the stranger cases the standard explicitly supports, and how, without being told what they are. I hope I never see some of the truncated and reduced precision forms in practice, since perhaps no one but the handful of people with access to the standard will be able to interpret those correctly. :)
  • kuschku 6y ago
    I actually had an issue like that recently, where our code didn't handle a special case in ISO8601 correctly. I managed to obtain ;) the standard and could adapt it, but if I hadn't obtained the standard, I'd have had to just close the issue with "WONTFIX".
• bokohut 6y ago
  As one that has experienced a project in the research phase being figuratively knee-capped by this money grab one would be led to believe that the ISO organization themselves would clearly and quite obviously see the lack of standards adoptions sourced from their very own actions. Catch-22 anyone?
• tannhaeuser 6y ago
  Don't know for which technical domain he demands open access to ISO standard texts (because many ISO standards, in fact, can be freely accessed [1] while others are accessible as pre-final, nearly identical versions), but I'm guessing ISO being essentially a complicated joint org of national standardization bodies, changing treaties and getting member votes etc. would be a difficult thing to do at this point. There's also the issue of spec editors selling copies of books containing spec text with commentary for financial compensation of their work. [1]: https://standards.iso.org/ittf/PubliclyAvailableStandards/index.html https://standards.iso.org/ittf/PubliclyAvailableStandards/in...
• pronik 6y ago
  It's way beyond comical right now. PDF standard document has been available from evil monopolist's Adobe's website for free up until version 1.7. Version 2.0 has been "freed" from Adobe and is now an "open" ISO standard and costs about €180. Guess what I'm reading when I need to work with PDFs...
• rjsw 6y ago
  I believe that the largest group of related ISO standards in terms of number of pages is ISO 10303 [1], I suspect that they could have achieved wider adoption if they were not paywalled. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_10303 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_10303
• dec0dedab0de 6y ago
  About 15 years ago I worked at a small ISP and one of my jobs was handling dmca take downs. Normally this was someone using bit torrent or other p2p software, and I would call them up and tell them to knock it off, or put a note on their account and block them until they called in. One time it was IEEE, one of our customers was a college professor, and he was using his personal web hosting space (remember that?) To host his syllabus including a pdf of one of their standards. I tried to get a hold of him multiple times, but they kept contacting us, more aggressively than the RIAA or MPAA ever did. So I just deleted the file.
• ramboldio 6y ago
  German DIN / Beuth Publishing does the same. Even for students the only option is to come by a branch of the publisher. Can't comprehend how they are still considered a 'standard'.
• ngcc_hk 6y ago
  It is a surprise to see even the title. It is the fundamental reason why ietf beat iso. How to do x25, ftam, ... etc., you are F... Sorry. Still remember the university I do have an outdated x25 as it can pay to get the update. How to implement ... sorry who on earth you dare to write anything on asn.1 which is supervisor of your post-doc. long time ago there is about a guy going around the world how his book on decnet and a new networking standard call “internet” is doing. He showed a bot how hard to get hold of iso standard. Those were the days. I thought ... or they still do not learn.
  • alacombe 6y ago
    > It is the fundamental reason why ietf beat iso Like by making a patent covered tech a "standard" ? https://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html#35 https://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html#35
• Const-me 6y ago
  I think that’s one of the reasons why Linux doesn’t have a multimedia stack on par with MS Media Foundation or Apple Core Video: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG-4#MPEG-4_Parts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG-4#MPEG-4_Parts
  • fomine3 6y ago
    FFmpeg/libavcodec is already available.
    • ddevault 6y ago
      And it's an industry standard, and best in its class. Sounds like someone who hasn't used Linux since the 00's.
    • Const-me 6y ago
      Technically it is, practically less than ideal. Example: https://www.willusher.io/general/2020/11/15/hw-accel-encoding-rpi4 https://www.willusher.io/general/2020/11/15/hw-accel-encodin... That's for a $50 computer with 45 millions copies sold, with Linux being the only OS supported by manufacturer. On other computers can be much worse. By comparison, install Windows on a computer, install a GPU driver, and Media Foundation API will use the hardware to decode and encode all supported formats, no recompilation needed.
      • lonjil 6y ago
        Access to hardware acceleration has absolutely nothing to do with the standards of the formats themselves. Clearly, since open implementations exist, open source developers know how the formats function. The problem with HW accel is that hardware vendors keep the details of how to access functions of the hardware is kept secret or otherwise locked behind proprietary code. But the same can be true of completely open standards like AV1.
        • Const-me 6y ago
          > Access to hardware acceleration has absolutely nothing to do with the standards of the formats themselves. I have implemented accelerated video playback myself https://github.com/Const-me/Vrmac/tree/master/VrmacVideo https://github.com/Const-me/Vrmac/tree/master/VrmacVideo and I disagree. Needed a lot of these standards, not just for containers and audio, for video decoding too. > since open implementations exist, open source developers know how the formats function. These formats are way more complicated than you think they are. Just because open source implementations decode/encode something doesn't mean the implementation is standard-compliant. My one certainly is not.
• An_ISO_Dude 6y ago
  Speaking as someone who is on an ISO committee, this topic of discussion comes up every couple years. The bottom line is that there are and will always be costs associated with a running an organization, regardless of whether they are for or non profit. There are overhead costs associated with running a website, conferences, technical review, or collaboration tooling for example. While some revenue comes from participants and membership fees, not everything gets covered. The organization does a lot for the public good and it's unacceptable to criticize these passionate engineers that have dedicated their careers to ensuring proper standards globally.
  • strogonoff 6y ago
    Surely making a standards organization entirely dependent on subsidies by forbidding it from selling literally the results of its work in a free economy isn’t going to backfire in any way…
    • An_ISO_Dude 6y ago
      We have to make money somehow. I don't understand how people don't understand why this is the case. If you increase the cost of other things then organizations and people won't want to be part of the committees. A lot of the revenue comes from organizations purchasing the work.
      • jonsneyers 6y ago
        ISO should be a division of the UN or something like that and get a steady budget to pay its staff. Not a regular private company that "has to make money somehow". At the very least, ISO could make the cost to get a copy of a standard not some arbitrary 3-digit number of Swiss Francs, but let the committees themselves have a say in this. In my opinion, for example, it would make perfect sense to make royalty-free specs (i.e. standards that only have Type-1 declarations) available online for free, while charging 4- or 5-digit numbers for patent encumbered specs (standards with Type-2 declarations) for which those who need access to those will have to pay 7- or 8-digit numbers in royalties anyway, so it's still an insignificant extra obstacle for them. The goal of ISO should be to promote international standardization. Its current business model is instead creating financial obstacles to adopt international standards, as well as creating financial incentives to base implementations on outdated drafts and old versions, which defeats the purpose of having processes to amend, correct and extend standards. Other standardization organizations like IETF, W3C, ITU are capable of "making money somehow" without having to put their standards behind a paywall. Standards are a lot like laws, except you in theory voluntarily comply with them (though not always — there are plenty of cases where compliance to ISO standards is obligatory in one way or another). It would be insane if politicians would put the laws they write behind a paywall, for sale to lawyers at 118 Swiss Francs per article, with the argument that "judges need to make money somehow". If you expect people to respect the law, the least you can do is to let them actually see the law, for free. Why would it be any different for international standards?
• smashah 6y ago
  Is there an example of something akin to ISO standards but on GitHub?
• dboreham 6y ago
  30 years too late.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• derefr 6y ago
  IMHO the fact that it costs money to read the ANSI SQL standard, is the biggest reason there’s never been any work toward a standardized SQL wire protocol. (At this point Postgres’s wire protocol is becoming the de-facto wire protocol for smaller players to make themselves compatible with, but that’s still a long ways from being able to talk to every major enterprise DBMS with the same codec-layer library, rather than needing ODBC-style codec plugins.) You need tons and tons of people to work together on a cross-implementation standardization effort like that (including, hopefully, lots of volunteer FOSS contributors); and all those people would need to be referencing the standard constantly. It’d just be untenable if every one of them needed to pay to see the standard they were coding against.
• SulphurCrested 6y ago
  ISO's argument seems to be that the fees fund the actual standardisation process – trips to conferences, meetings and other "technical work". I could agree for something like the international definition of physical quantities, where people have to do actual experiments, or travel to see equipment or even transport standard items. But in software designs, often when you tip more resources into a project, you get a worse result. This is true for the C++ standard. Some necessary improvements occur (modules, finally, albeit incomplete with respect to build details), but as long as a large group of people meet to evaluate each others' proposals in a series of desirable resorts, the language will continue to grow in size and complexity whether or not it actually needs to. For example, adding "xvalues" to "lvalues" and "rvalues" may solve some earlier design problem in the standard library, but makes the language less understandable for users and implementers and the standards text more opaque. Indeed, the standards language for C++ is so inscrutable one suspects that you need to be a full-time expert to fully understand it. It then becomes a career for the people involved in the standardisation. Now they have an incentive for the language to grow without bound, and the more complex and hard to understand it becomes, the better.
  • lonjil 6y ago
    As far as I know the fees don't even pay for most of that stuff. Committee members have to pay to be part of a committee, usually paid by their employer. The time actually spent developing the standard is on the members' employers' payroll as well.
    • saw-lau 6y ago
      This is definitely how it works with the IEC - I can't imagine the ISO are any different.
• Causality1 6y ago
  That's pretty wild. If the standards aren't open-access how am I supposed to know if someone who claims to be following them is actually doing so?
• jonsneyers 6y ago
  As an editor of ISO/IEC 18181 (JPEG XL), I politely yet strongly disagree with this ISO policy of paywalling standards. It is an adoption obstacle and an incentive to use outdated drafts. The core of the problem is that we somehow put a private Swiss company in charge of international standardization. Of course that company needs to make money _somehow_ to pay its staff. But that would better be done via government subsidies than via selling specs. In a way, this reminds me a lot of academic publishing. It's not the publishers who write the papers, yet they get to paywall science. We need open access standards, just like we need open access scientific journals.
• FentanylFloyd 6y ago
  https://files.catbox.moe/rswt9s.jpg https://files.catbox.moe/rswt9s.jpg https://archive.org/details/et.iso.20541.2012/page/n7/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/et.iso.20541.2012/page/n7/mode/2... I laughed when I saw pic above in my laboratory
• p1mrx 6y ago
  Let's protest by switching to YYYY-DD-MM.
• pornel 6y ago
  I've recently implemented an AVIF encoder (built on ISO HEIF), and working with the specs was quite unpleasant. It's a tower of ISO standards built on top of other ISO standards, with each level they're getting older, broader, and less relevant to the original format they were supposed to be for, so sum of all these specs makes something that is bloated and overcomplicated. A key spec in this pile was paywalled, so I've reverse-engineered an existing implementation instead. And guess what? The implementation I used as a reference wasn't compliant with the paywalled standard either. So now AVIF-in-the-wild is not compatible with the ISO-AVIF. Great job, ISO!
• saw-lau 6y ago
  This has always frustrated me. I sit on a number of IEC working groups as a technical expert (as part of TC 80 for maritime equipment). None of us get paid by the IEC (which is fine), but we all donate either ours or our company's time to attend meetings and produce input papers, etc. Meeting rooms tend to be provided by either national standards bodies (like BSI here in the UK) or companies who are providing technical experts to the meeting. In pre-COVID days the meetings were face-to-face, which meant somebody (not the IEC!) stumping up for travel and accommodation as well. Even as members of these working groups writing standards that refer out to other standards, we don't get free access to these and have to pay for them. It's crazy. I'm really proud of the work I've done over the years helping to get these standards published, but it's really annoying that there's such a barrier of entry to people who want to use them to produce compliant equipment.
• miga 6y ago
  Is it even legal to require standards compliance in the law? I thought that law has to be open and available to everyone?
• phendrenad2 6y ago
  "Everything should be free except the things I make" Twitter is at it again.
• FrozenVoid 6y ago
  having a paid standard devalues the entire concept of 'standards' and instead encourages non-standard approaches, like having a secret law would promote non-compliance to it.
• secfirstmd 6y ago
  If a standard is the cost of a monthly wage in most of the world it's not a useful standard