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Suggested title: Publicly Available Standards by ISO ISO is somewhat unique in requiring you to pay money to even know what the standard says before you can ev

Suggested title: Publicly Available Standards by ISO ISO is somewhat unique in requiring you to pay money to even know what the standard says before you can ever think about being in compliance. Most other standards organizations (i.e. NIST, IETF, W3C) do not have this weird financial burden, so merely "Publicly Available Standards" doesn't sell the significance of this. Making their standards publicly available is a good move by ISO. I hope we see more of this.

hlandau 5y ago
This offering isn't, as far as I know, anything new. AFAIK ISO is funded by their paywall and as an international treaty organisation is probably far harder to reform than industry organisations, so I don't have much hope for this to change. ISO's attitude to this was recently expressed on Twitter: https://nitter.snopyta.org/MetaCatie/status/1368910356664483845#m https://nitter.snopyta.org/MetaCatie/status/1368910356664483... ISO even takes freely available standards from other organizations and paywalls them, even reneging on previous agreements to make a standard freely available, for example: https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/18/schematron_standard_paywall/ https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/18/schematron_standard_p...
- tephra 5y ago
  I'm not sure about the numbers but I would have thought that ISOs main funding comes from all the member nations who pay a bunch a money proportional to the countries GDP?
  - Santosh83 5y ago
    So they're funded by dozens of nations yet charge a fee to access their so-called Public Standards? Operational costs cannot be covered by the member countries? After all, public standards benefit everyone, and is the raison d'etre for the ISO to be constituted in the first place. A corporate paywall makes sense, not from an org acting for the public.
  - JyrkiAlakuijala 5y ago
    National standardization organisations participating in ISO usually make their budgets publicly available. Last time I looked I got an impression that the standards sales are contributing to their budgets (perhaps 1/3 or 1/4 of income). From the annual reports it was a bit unclear why the usual national standardization organization need to have wealth in $50M (instead of between 100'000 and a million) for being able to continue distributing standards.
mqus 5y ago
> Making their standards publicly available is a good move by ISO. I hope we see more of this. Afaik there were always publicly available standards in the ISO portfolio. Is this list new?
mvanga 5y ago
I wonder if there exists a Sci-Hub equivalent for ISO standard PDFs somewhere.
- DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
  My pet fish found ISO standards PDFs on Sci-Hub a few times.
  - have_faith 5y ago
    Clever girl
- auxym 5y ago
  Some can be found on libgen.
Gracana 5y ago
I'm envious of people who can work with freely available standards. In my industry (machine design, industrial automation), almost all of the standards cost money. UL, CSA, NSF, ANSI, ASME, BSi, IEC, ISO, DIN, etc. Our library contains many thousands of dollars worth of documents, and it costs many more to keep them up to date. If your company has a slow or complicated purchasing process, it's a real hinderance when you realize you need a standard and have to stop working so you can deal with acquiring it. I think the only ones that are freely available are NFPA 70 (national electric code), NFPA 79 (electrical standard for industrial machinery), but if you want to download or print them, you still have to pay.
- bierjunge 5y ago
  I feel your pain. Most projects I work on are medical software, often connected to hardware. Getting this stuff certified is impossible without paying thousands of euros for the standards and then you pay even more for a few people who judge if you did it like the standard says. But maybe the next project will be outside of the medical field.
- LeifCarrotson 5y ago
  My library (in the same industry) contains a few hundred dollars worth of documents, because that's all I could get purchasing to pay for. We're just a small integrator, many to most in our field simply don't know what's in the documents because they don't buy any of them. You can go a long way with cargo-cult designs, and a ton of companies get by with approximations, but there are a ton of mistakes made because ANSI/ISO/DIN/IEC refuse to make the documents available for free.
- helloworld11 5y ago
  Sorry to intrude with an ignorant question, but I know next to nothing about this and it sparked my curiosity. These thousands of dollars in documents are the text descriptions/instructions of various ISO standards? Do they really cost that much or am I misinterpreting? Wouldn't their content have been pirated by now if they were so expensive? (assuming i'm correctly imagining what you said)
OJFord 5y ago
Actually, HN guidelines are to do the reverse: > If the title includes the name of the site, please take it out, because the site name will be displayed after the link. e.g. if this had been 'ISO announces publicly available standards' on iso.org itself, the submitter should (or if not and a popular/noticed submission, a mod would) change it to the 'Publicly available standards' that it is.
- kragen 5y ago
  An ISO page with a list of publicly available IETF, NIST, and W3C standards would not be nearly as interesting.
  - OJFord 5y ago
    Oh I see what you mean, I suppose 'Publicly available ISO standards' is more reasonable, but personally I assumed that when I saw 'iso.org'.
AlbertCory 5y ago
There's been an extensive debate on an external mailing list about standards, and why TCP won over OSI. The free and open nature of IETF had a hell of a lot to do with it. Among all the other advantages noted here, it leads to a much shorter development cycle and a greater number of people participating -- people whose energy is invaluable.

hlandau 5y ago

This offering isn't, as far as I know, anything new. AFAIK ISO is funded by their paywall and as an international treaty organisation is probably far harder to reform than industry organisations, so I don't have much hope for this to change. ISO's attitude to this was recently expressed on Twitter: https://nitter.snopyta.org/MetaCatie/status/1368910356664483845#m https://nitter.snopyta.org/MetaCatie/status/1368910356664483... ISO even takes freely available standards from other organizations and paywalls them, even reneging on previous agreements to make a standard freely available, for example: https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/18/schematron_standard_paywall/ https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/18/schematron_standard_p...

tephra 5y ago
I'm not sure about the numbers but I would have thought that ISOs main funding comes from all the member nations who pay a bunch a money proportional to the countries GDP?
- Santosh83 5y ago
  So they're funded by dozens of nations yet charge a fee to access their so-called Public Standards? Operational costs cannot be covered by the member countries? After all, public standards benefit everyone, and is the raison d'etre for the ISO to be constituted in the first place. A corporate paywall makes sense, not from an org acting for the public.
- JyrkiAlakuijala 5y ago
  National standardization organisations participating in ISO usually make their budgets publicly available. Last time I looked I got an impression that the standards sales are contributing to their budgets (perhaps 1/3 or 1/4 of income). From the annual reports it was a bit unclear why the usual national standardization organization need to have wealth in $50M (instead of between 100'000 and a million) for being able to continue distributing standards.

mqus 5y ago

> Making their standards publicly available is a good move by ISO. I hope we see more of this. Afaik there were always publicly available standards in the ISO portfolio. Is this list new?

mvanga 5y ago

I wonder if there exists a Sci-Hub equivalent for ISO standard PDFs somewhere.

DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
My pet fish found ISO standards PDFs on Sci-Hub a few times.
- have_faith 5y ago
  Clever girl
auxym 5y ago
Some can be found on libgen.

Gracana 5y ago

I'm envious of people who can work with freely available standards. In my industry (machine design, industrial automation), almost all of the standards cost money. UL, CSA, NSF, ANSI, ASME, BSi, IEC, ISO, DIN, etc. Our library contains many thousands of dollars worth of documents, and it costs many more to keep them up to date. If your company has a slow or complicated purchasing process, it's a real hinderance when you realize you need a standard and have to stop working so you can deal with acquiring it. I think the only ones that are freely available are NFPA 70 (national electric code), NFPA 79 (electrical standard for industrial machinery), but if you want to download or print them, you still have to pay.

bierjunge 5y ago
I feel your pain. Most projects I work on are medical software, often connected to hardware. Getting this stuff certified is impossible without paying thousands of euros for the standards and then you pay even more for a few people who judge if you did it like the standard says. But maybe the next project will be outside of the medical field.
LeifCarrotson 5y ago
My library (in the same industry) contains a few hundred dollars worth of documents, because that's all I could get purchasing to pay for. We're just a small integrator, many to most in our field simply don't know what's in the documents because they don't buy any of them. You can go a long way with cargo-cult designs, and a ton of companies get by with approximations, but there are a ton of mistakes made because ANSI/ISO/DIN/IEC refuse to make the documents available for free.
helloworld11 5y ago
Sorry to intrude with an ignorant question, but I know next to nothing about this and it sparked my curiosity. These thousands of dollars in documents are the text descriptions/instructions of various ISO standards? Do they really cost that much or am I misinterpreting? Wouldn't their content have been pirated by now if they were so expensive? (assuming i'm correctly imagining what you said)

OJFord 5y ago

Actually, HN guidelines are to do the reverse: > If the title includes the name of the site, please take it out, because the site name will be displayed after the link. e.g. if this had been 'ISO announces publicly available standards' on iso.org itself, the submitter should (or if not and a popular/noticed submission, a mod would) change it to the 'Publicly available standards' that it is.

kragen 5y ago
An ISO page with a list of publicly available IETF, NIST, and W3C standards would not be nearly as interesting.
- OJFord 5y ago
  Oh I see what you mean, I suppose 'Publicly available ISO standards' is more reasonable, but personally I assumed that when I saw 'iso.org'.

AlbertCory 5y ago

There's been an extensive debate on an external mailing list about standards, and why TCP won over OSI. The free and open nature of IETF had a hell of a lot to do with it. Among all the other advantages noted here, it leads to a much shorter development cycle and a greater number of people participating -- people whose energy is invaluable.