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> Who would have thought that "international standards" that require payment don't work well? Who says that they don't work well? All of the manufactured good

> Who would have thought that "international standards" that require payment don't work well? Who says that they don't work well? All of the manufactured goods that you own, and how they got transported (e.g., shipping containers, boats, fuel for boats, etc) are probably based a dozens of ISO (and ANSI, SAE, etc) standards that had to be paid for. It's been the norm for about a century and helped build the modern world. See Engineering rules: global standard setting since 1880 by Yates and Murphy for a history. There are some good lectures by them online as well: * https://www.hagley.org/research/history-hangout-0 https://www.hagley.org/research/history-hangout-0

lxgr 4y ago
Sure, but the current model is just ridiculous. 290 or so CHF* is probably less than the procurement bureaucratic overhead in a large corporation that bases an entire line of business on a given standard, yet is prohibitive for hobbyists and many open-source projects. A more reasonable model these days would probably be a per-seat license for an entire segment of the ISO library. As it is, I don’t even know if a given standard would actually be useful to have for my work, companies need to decide which employee(s) to license a copy for etc… * I’m surprised it’s not billed in special drawing rights.
- 4pkjai 4y ago
  I run a business that extracts data from PDFs, even I couldn’t justify paying 290 CHF to buy a copy of the standard
  - gorkish 4y ago
    I found an error/omission in the PDF spec 20 years ago and it's still there despite my efforts to characterize and report it to the grand overlords of PDF. (There is no security implication, hence I am nobody.) When Apple eventually changed their implementation to be consistent with Adobe's, I gave up all further attempts as a waste of time. My errata document is available under a $5000/yr corporate subscription agreement to my personal standards and practices library. Sorry, I do not offer memberships to individuals.
s1mon 4y ago
They don’t work well for product development. I’ve worked in consumer and medical product development for 30+ years. I’ve worked as a consultant or contractor or directly for companies from startups to Fortune 50. So many small companies or even teams at big companies don’t know about the standards that they should follow (ISO, ASME, UL etc) or if they do they don’t want to pay for them. Then there’s the complexity of tracking licenses and copies with electronic downloads, which I promise you no one does 100% right. There are third parties who will track this for companies but I’ve never managed to get anyone to use them. It’s hard to even get everyone I’ve worked with to follow ASME Y14.5, which is the drawing and dimensioning standard for mechanical engineering (in the US). Part of the challenge is that so many of these standards are broken up into 50 different parts that are purchased separately. Oh, you want to know how to dimension castings, that’s a separate document. Abbreviations to use on drawings, that’s separate. Drawing formats, that’s separate. Etc. The result is that people collect old PDFs they “found” somewhere, and no one has a complete, up to date set of standards for any field. Even if someone at a company tries to get people to pay for standards, they maybe put them on a shared drive somewhere and they aren’t properly licensed for the team. The results are that standards aren’t known or properly followed. Which is supposedly the purpose of standards orgs, but most of them use publications as a source of income, which defeats their purpose. There are a few standards like USB, which are free to download. This should be universal.
- MichaelZuo 4y ago
  If they were free then the readers of such standards wouldn't be the customers of the standards organizations but the product.
- rstuart4133 4y ago
  > They don’t work well for product development. I've used the ISO standards to develop smart card software. Before that I'd mostly consulted IETF standards. The IETF standards are carefully crafted, clearly written by someone with experience in developing the thing they are documenting. That's probably because it's IEFT policy to insist on working code before the standard is ratified. The approach seems to be making it possible to to develop an interoperable version with that existing code just from the published standard. Since that's inevitably what you are trying to do it's a joy to work with. The ISO standards on the other hand come across as brain dump made to look organised by the addition of bullet points, numbered lists and a table of contents. They give no explanation on why they made the design decisions behind the standard, so you end up having to re-discover it all yourself. It takes forever. Having to pay for the ISO standards just adds insult to injury. As I was developing something that was a one off (I later open sourced most of it), I could not justify the thousands ISO was demanding. Fortunately if you dig long and hard enough, you can find copies of most of it lying around on the web.
gorkish 4y ago
> standards that had to be paid for. I am extremely skeptical that everyone who has ever designed a glass bottle cap has paid for the glass packaging neck thread specifications. I know I sure as shit didn't the last time I had to make one. Come at me, bottlecap cartel. Sure, there is a collective cost to develop and maintain standards, but making sure that they can be openly accessed afterwards should be considered as part of this cost burden. I really could care less if something is "the norm" when it's still obviously antithetical to it's purpose. Saying "the norm" is always, always, always a red flag phrase that something is being held very far away from a natural state of balance.

lxgr 4y ago

Sure, but the current model is just ridiculous. 290 or so CHF* is probably less than the procurement bureaucratic overhead in a large corporation that bases an entire line of business on a given standard, yet is prohibitive for hobbyists and many open-source projects. A more reasonable model these days would probably be a per-seat license for an entire segment of the ISO library. As it is, I don’t even know if a given standard would actually be useful to have for my work, companies need to decide which employee(s) to license a copy for etc… * I’m surprised it’s not billed in special drawing rights.

4pkjai 4y ago
I run a business that extracts data from PDFs, even I couldn’t justify paying 290 CHF to buy a copy of the standard
- gorkish 4y ago
  I found an error/omission in the PDF spec 20 years ago and it's still there despite my efforts to characterize and report it to the grand overlords of PDF. (There is no security implication, hence I am nobody.) When Apple eventually changed their implementation to be consistent with Adobe's, I gave up all further attempts as a waste of time. My errata document is available under a $5000/yr corporate subscription agreement to my personal standards and practices library. Sorry, I do not offer memberships to individuals.

s1mon 4y ago

They don’t work well for product development. I’ve worked in consumer and medical product development for 30+ years. I’ve worked as a consultant or contractor or directly for companies from startups to Fortune 50. So many small companies or even teams at big companies don’t know about the standards that they should follow (ISO, ASME, UL etc) or if they do they don’t want to pay for them. Then there’s the complexity of tracking licenses and copies with electronic downloads, which I promise you no one does 100% right. There are third parties who will track this for companies but I’ve never managed to get anyone to use them. It’s hard to even get everyone I’ve worked with to follow ASME Y14.5, which is the drawing and dimensioning standard for mechanical engineering (in the US). Part of the challenge is that so many of these standards are broken up into 50 different parts that are purchased separately. Oh, you want to know how to dimension castings, that’s a separate document. Abbreviations to use on drawings, that’s separate. Drawing formats, that’s separate. Etc. The result is that people collect old PDFs they “found” somewhere, and no one has a complete, up to date set of standards for any field. Even if someone at a company tries to get people to pay for standards, they maybe put them on a shared drive somewhere and they aren’t properly licensed for the team. The results are that standards aren’t known or properly followed. Which is supposedly the purpose of standards orgs, but most of them use publications as a source of income, which defeats their purpose. There are a few standards like USB, which are free to download. This should be universal.

MichaelZuo 4y ago
If they were free then the readers of such standards wouldn't be the customers of the standards organizations but the product.
rstuart4133 4y ago
> They don’t work well for product development. I've used the ISO standards to develop smart card software. Before that I'd mostly consulted IETF standards. The IETF standards are carefully crafted, clearly written by someone with experience in developing the thing they are documenting. That's probably because it's IEFT policy to insist on working code before the standard is ratified. The approach seems to be making it possible to to develop an interoperable version with that existing code just from the published standard. Since that's inevitably what you are trying to do it's a joy to work with. The ISO standards on the other hand come across as brain dump made to look organised by the addition of bullet points, numbered lists and a table of contents. They give no explanation on why they made the design decisions behind the standard, so you end up having to re-discover it all yourself. It takes forever. Having to pay for the ISO standards just adds insult to injury. As I was developing something that was a one off (I later open sourced most of it), I could not justify the thousands ISO was demanding. Fortunately if you dig long and hard enough, you can find copies of most of it lying around on the web.

gorkish 4y ago

> standards that had to be paid for. I am extremely skeptical that everyone who has ever designed a glass bottle cap has paid for the glass packaging neck thread specifications. I know I sure as shit didn't the last time I had to make one. Come at me, bottlecap cartel. Sure, there is a collective cost to develop and maintain standards, but making sure that they can be openly accessed afterwards should be considered as part of this cost burden. I really could care less if something is "the norm" when it's still obviously antithetical to it's purpose. Saying "the norm" is always, always, always a red flag phrase that something is being held very far away from a natural state of balance.