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> 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 b

> 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™?

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™?