3 ms·
As I said, the incentive for authors is thus to make the standard incomprehensible, hard to navigate, voluminous, ... and sell a book about it the profit of whi
by tannhaeuser 3y ago
As I said, the incentive for authors is thus to make the standard incomprehensible, hard to navigate, voluminous, ... and sell a book about it the profit of which goes to the author(s) and publisher. The authors and potential sponsors also negotiate the selling price of the standard or whether it can be downloaded for free, thus can inflate the price. That kind of deal is how experts in the field get even involved - otherwise what would the incentive be for an editor when the process of establishing consensus is extremely long (multiple years), tedious, and expensive.
- layer8 3y agoAt least in the fields I’m working in, the incentive is interoperability, and the authors are payed by the companies that are members of the standards organization, and/or are academics that are payed for consulting work. The incentives are really the same as for “open” standards like IETF, WhatWG, etc. The fact that standards are often difficult to parse is more a side-effect of compromise wording, non-English authors, and technical terseness, and that they effectively act more as a contract between the member companies, which already have the institutional knowledge to interpret the wording.