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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 rele
by 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 agoAgree with all you say. Apparently people sometimes put ISO documents on libgen, potentially saving the expense.
- kaliszad 6y agoYes, 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 agoI 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.
- detaro 6y agoUniversity libraries sometimes make standards available to everyone with a library card. But at least in the cases I've seen, they have ToS limiting usage to research/non-commercial. Which also makes the "hire a student" plan a bad one, hiring someone and then expecting them to break their uni's rules/the standard's license isn't great.
- lathiat 6y agoSame problem in Australia with the AS/NZS standards. I've been having problems with my whiteset plaster, which is like a liquid applied white plaster surface used on almost every home here in Western Australia. Mine was done incorrectly, I had to purchase two different $250 standards to understand how it was done wrong, how it should behave, how it was tested, in order to file a complaint. It may not surprise you part of the reason it was applied incorrectly is because not every trade has a copy of said standard. And then even once you purchase it, it's a "one user" watermarked PDF you're supposed to only have 1 copy of and there's lots of harsh warnings about that, so even those that have it and scared to run around with it. It's a crazy situation. Because this is legislated stuff for building. As a consumer it's very expensive to inform yourself on these things. If you wanted to inform yourself on all aspects of a build it would get expensive fast. It's also difficult for me to publish and discuss this information in the public domain to help other consumers having the same problem, as the limits of how much text I can "copy" appears technically set at 0 even though it's standard to "reference" it. But it's very easy to mis-interpret the standard if you don't read things in context. If the standards are effectively government legislated they either need to be government funded (this makes total sense to me) or the price needs to be much more token, 10 dollars, with much less draconian access. But at that price the government may as well fund it anyway.
- brutusborn 6y agoThe worst part is the amount of cross referenced standards. You buy 1, then realize to interpret it correctly, you need to buy a list of 10 standards, then repeat the process with those 10. This encourages piracy and use of old standards.
- hanniabu 6y agoWhy aren't there mirrors?
- cwkoss 6y agoI would love to fight the government on a code violation by essentially arguing that "Either you put the code standard in the public domain, or it is not valid law". But I'm sure I'm not wealthy enough to afford that fight
- xtracto 6y agoI dont understand why these PDFs are not in scihub or libgen...
- TeMPOraL 6y agoApparently they're extensively watermarked to identify the purchaser.
- AceJohnny2 6y ago> 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. Related anecdote: years ago I worked a semiconductor company, which was working with a competitor to standardize the sensor/camera component for the OpenMAX [1] multimedia framework (like GStreamer). We wanted a unified component that output a finished image (because our hardware was capable for that), but the competitor wanted modular components that produced/consumed pieces transferred to memory (because their HW was more limited). I think the final standard followed theirs, much to our chagrin. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenMAX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenMAX