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ISO business model is so strange; in order to make money they have to hide the actual standard from the vast majority of engineers that it relates to, so we jus

ISO business model is so strange; in order to make money they have to hide the actual standard from the vast majority of engineers that it relates to, so we just assume whatever was proposed was close enough.

ademarre 5y ago
There are very many things I never would have discovered and learned if IETF RFCs were not free. The most useful knowledge I've acquired about building things on the internet came from there. Industries that are more reliant on ISO or other non-free standards are surely worse off because of it.
marcosdumay 5y ago
Yes, on practice the draft becomes the actual standard. That is, unless it's in a regulated industry that is required by law to follow the actual standard. Then it disobeys the law most of the time, and "disobey" the market the rest of the time and everything breaks. Also, it leaves the people with a secret law that nobody can know the consequences. The ISO governance should be changed ASAP. It was never good, and nowadays it's a disaster.
- dv_dt 5y ago
  Yup, I wonder if an issuing group pays a fee on new versions as well as a maintenance fee would work out.
- skissane 5y ago
  > The ISO governance should be changed ASAP. It was never good, and nowadays it's a disaster. ISO was founded in 1947, and back then very many of its standards were about physical objects – pipe threads, screws, bearings, belts, film, steel, plastic, rubber, textiles, etc – and even today they still have many standards on those kinds of topics. Imagine you are an aerospace engineer in the 1970s, and you need a copy of the new standard ISO 46:1973 (Aircraft — Fuel nozzle grounding plugs and sockets) – if nobody at your work has a copy, you just order it and pay for it with the company's money (expense it, get your boss to sign the purchase order, whatever). Nobody would have a problem with that and you wouldn't think there was anything inappropriate about it either, it would just seem totally normal to anybody in the 1970s. The problem is that technology and culture have changed and ISO hasn't kept up – especially for software-related standards. We are an industry in which there are lots of independent contractors and self-employed people and small businesses, it is easy to be self-taught, in which multi-billion dollar companies will charge millions for software packages and then include in their code some open source library that someone maintains as an unpaid hobby, in which many employers baulk at paying for things which in prior decades employers would have just paid for without question. The culture has changed from one in which people are used to paying money for physical books in person or via mail order, to one in which they expect to get information from the Internet instantaneously and for free. And it is probably mostly in software that people complain about this. I could be wrong, but I would guess that for aerospace engineers it is no more an issue today than in the 1970s. Even if ISO were to charge a few hundred dollars for a standards document, it would still be a lot cheaper than most things aerospace engineers deal with, and your employer will pay for it, who cares. At big firms such as Airbus or Boeing, they probably have some kind of subscription so their engineers just get access to all new ISO standards automatically.
  - ademarre 5y ago
    > software-related standards. We are an industry in which there are lots of independent contractors and self-employed people and small businesses, it is easy to be self-taught Consider also the pace of innovation in software and networking—the internet at large. I think it's both a consequence and a cause of the change in culture you described.
  - marcosdumay 5y ago
    Mandated ISO standards in 1947 was absurd secret law too. Democracy is not that new of a concept. It's just that both regulations were much lighter so much fewer people would be affected, and at that time the world was in an extremely totalitarian mood, divided by two countries that imposed dictatorships wherever they went. But entrepreneurship existed by then just like it does now, and you can bet many people went poorer because they couldn't access the standards. Also, they were much less accessible. If you couldn't just go to a library to read them because they weren't free, it meant most people could not get them at all. It was not just a matter of getting in a phone and calling the ISO customer center.
    - skissane 5y ago
      > Mandated ISO standards in 1947 was absurd secret law too. Democracy is not that new of a concept. In the 1940s, if you wanted to read legislation, there was no downloading it for free off the Internet – either you purchased a printed copy, or found a library that held it – and you may have had to travel some distance to do so, there was no guarantee that your neighbourhood public library did. Most people viewed charging for printed copies of legislation as acceptable, given that it cost money to print them. So, in that sense, legally mandated ISO standards weren't fundamentally different from laws in general. Prior to the 1990s, when the Internet began to change people's expectations, the idea that everyone was entitled to a free personal copy of all legislation was not widely accepted, and few would have labelled that situation as anti-democratic or as "absurd secret law". > It was not just a matter of getting in a phone and calling the ISO customer center. In the 1940s, rather than calling the ISO secretariat in Switzerland directly, you would have called your national standards body, who acted as a reseller. Buying standards then was only harder than today in the sense that buying anything back then was harder than today.
- eli 5y ago
  It should not be legal to incorporate proprietary standards into law.
  - saghm 5y ago
    At least in the US, it's fairly hard to outlaw changing laws in certain ways since the people with the power to pass new laws are equally able to change past ones, including the ones that limit their power. The way to do something like this would be to put it in the Constitution, which isn't able to be changed through legislation alone, but it seems that for the time being, adding new amendments isn't really something we're doing as a country.
    - eli 5y ago
      To be clear: I'm not requesting any new rights, merely the enforcement of existing legal principles that laws cannot be copyrighted by a private entity and that people have a fundamental right to freely read the laws that bind them. Carl Malamud has been fighting this point worldwide with some success for decades. For example here's the state or Oregon agreeing: https://public.resource.org/oregon.gov/index.html https://public.resource.org/oregon.gov/index.html

ademarre 5y ago

There are very many things I never would have discovered and learned if IETF RFCs were not free. The most useful knowledge I've acquired about building things on the internet came from there. Industries that are more reliant on ISO or other non-free standards are surely worse off because of it.

marcosdumay 5y ago

Yes, on practice the draft becomes the actual standard. That is, unless it's in a regulated industry that is required by law to follow the actual standard. Then it disobeys the law most of the time, and "disobey" the market the rest of the time and everything breaks. Also, it leaves the people with a secret law that nobody can know the consequences. The ISO governance should be changed ASAP. It was never good, and nowadays it's a disaster.

dv_dt 5y ago
Yup, I wonder if an issuing group pays a fee on new versions as well as a maintenance fee would work out.
skissane 5y ago
> The ISO governance should be changed ASAP. It was never good, and nowadays it's a disaster. ISO was founded in 1947, and back then very many of its standards were about physical objects – pipe threads, screws, bearings, belts, film, steel, plastic, rubber, textiles, etc – and even today they still have many standards on those kinds of topics. Imagine you are an aerospace engineer in the 1970s, and you need a copy of the new standard ISO 46:1973 (Aircraft — Fuel nozzle grounding plugs and sockets) – if nobody at your work has a copy, you just order it and pay for it with the company's money (expense it, get your boss to sign the purchase order, whatever). Nobody would have a problem with that and you wouldn't think there was anything inappropriate about it either, it would just seem totally normal to anybody in the 1970s. The problem is that technology and culture have changed and ISO hasn't kept up – especially for software-related standards. We are an industry in which there are lots of independent contractors and self-employed people and small businesses, it is easy to be self-taught, in which multi-billion dollar companies will charge millions for software packages and then include in their code some open source library that someone maintains as an unpaid hobby, in which many employers baulk at paying for things which in prior decades employers would have just paid for without question. The culture has changed from one in which people are used to paying money for physical books in person or via mail order, to one in which they expect to get information from the Internet instantaneously and for free. And it is probably mostly in software that people complain about this. I could be wrong, but I would guess that for aerospace engineers it is no more an issue today than in the 1970s. Even if ISO were to charge a few hundred dollars for a standards document, it would still be a lot cheaper than most things aerospace engineers deal with, and your employer will pay for it, who cares. At big firms such as Airbus or Boeing, they probably have some kind of subscription so their engineers just get access to all new ISO standards automatically.
- ademarre 5y ago
  > software-related standards. We are an industry in which there are lots of independent contractors and self-employed people and small businesses, it is easy to be self-taught Consider also the pace of innovation in software and networking—the internet at large. I think it's both a consequence and a cause of the change in culture you described.
- marcosdumay 5y ago
  Mandated ISO standards in 1947 was absurd secret law too. Democracy is not that new of a concept. It's just that both regulations were much lighter so much fewer people would be affected, and at that time the world was in an extremely totalitarian mood, divided by two countries that imposed dictatorships wherever they went. But entrepreneurship existed by then just like it does now, and you can bet many people went poorer because they couldn't access the standards. Also, they were much less accessible. If you couldn't just go to a library to read them because they weren't free, it meant most people could not get them at all. It was not just a matter of getting in a phone and calling the ISO customer center.
  - skissane 5y ago
    > Mandated ISO standards in 1947 was absurd secret law too. Democracy is not that new of a concept. In the 1940s, if you wanted to read legislation, there was no downloading it for free off the Internet – either you purchased a printed copy, or found a library that held it – and you may have had to travel some distance to do so, there was no guarantee that your neighbourhood public library did. Most people viewed charging for printed copies of legislation as acceptable, given that it cost money to print them. So, in that sense, legally mandated ISO standards weren't fundamentally different from laws in general. Prior to the 1990s, when the Internet began to change people's expectations, the idea that everyone was entitled to a free personal copy of all legislation was not widely accepted, and few would have labelled that situation as anti-democratic or as "absurd secret law". > It was not just a matter of getting in a phone and calling the ISO customer center. In the 1940s, rather than calling the ISO secretariat in Switzerland directly, you would have called your national standards body, who acted as a reseller. Buying standards then was only harder than today in the sense that buying anything back then was harder than today.
eli 5y ago
It should not be legal to incorporate proprietary standards into law.
- saghm 5y ago
  At least in the US, it's fairly hard to outlaw changing laws in certain ways since the people with the power to pass new laws are equally able to change past ones, including the ones that limit their power. The way to do something like this would be to put it in the Constitution, which isn't able to be changed through legislation alone, but it seems that for the time being, adding new amendments isn't really something we're doing as a country.
  - eli 5y ago
    To be clear: I'm not requesting any new rights, merely the enforcement of existing legal principles that laws cannot be copyrighted by a private entity and that people have a fundamental right to freely read the laws that bind them. Carl Malamud has been fighting this point worldwide with some success for decades. For example here's the state or Oregon agreeing: https://public.resource.org/oregon.gov/index.html https://public.resource.org/oregon.gov/index.html