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The question is why do we use proprietary formats and specifications such as HDMI, DisplayPort, Thunderbolt, Lightning. Aren't we able to create and use open s

The question is why do we use proprietary formats and specifications such as HDMI, DisplayPort, Thunderbolt, Lightning. Aren't we able to create and use open standards?

salviati 3y ago
It sounds like you're not aware of the reason. I personally believe that the reson is that there are many entities pushing against open standards since they would make copying easier and DRM harder.
- mglz 3y ago
  This is correct. That's also why there is an ongoing trend to push users into walled gardens and onto hardware they do not control. Or as Cory Doctorow calls it the "war on general-purpose computing"
  - toxik 3y ago
    It's a battle for the control of the device. The ideal setup for the big corpos is that we do not own our devices, but we rent them, and they can then charge arbitrarily for different uses of them. This was what AT&T did with phones back in the day.
    - tomohawk 3y ago
      To expand on that, AT&T had a regulated monopoly. You were not allowed to attach non AT&T devices to their network, and they had the only network (and no one else could set one up by law). You did not own a phone, but leased it on a monthly basis. When the telephone answering machine was invented (not by AT&T) you could not legally attach it. The plus of this arrangement was that AT&T made devices that would last for decades, all areas of the country got service (regardless of wealth or population density or politics), and costs were not surprising. The minus of this arrangement was that innovation was stifled and some costs were artificially high. It became a competitive disadvantage that was holding our country back from innovation. There is a correlated timeframe between the breakup of AT&T and the massive expansion of the computer industry.
      - indymike 3y ago
        > costs were not surprising Costs were mind boggling and surprising. I got in huge trouble when I was in elementary school because I called my best friend who lived 1 mile away. It could cost more to call someone who lived in a different LATA (in my case, the other LATA was one mile away) than it did to call a different time zone. As I recall a call 1 mile away was billed at 23¢ per minute and a call to Portland, Oregon, three time zones away was 12¢ per minute (and this was in 1977 money, which where one dollar was worth six hamburgers). Another: the cost to rent a handset was $3 per month. By 1988 (and $1 was worth four hamburgers), you could buy a touch tone phone for $3 at Target.
        tomohawk 3y ago
        Absolutely right - I'd forgotten about that. The fun of regulation driven services.
- DeathArrow 3y ago
  Limiting choice and freedom is never a good answer to an issue.
hobofan 3y ago
> Aren't we able to create and use open standards? In theory, sure. In practice you'll have to construct a financially sustainable organization that is able to motivate all interested parties to chip in and is also able to certify the implementation and at the same time also doesn't fall victim to internal corruption (e.g. high C-level compensation making it unsustainable). I think there are few-to-no precedents for that in the open source space in general, and even less when it comes to standards body organizations for maintaining a standard at that level of complexity. In most domains proprietary specifications form the backbone of everything. A lot of governments refer to ISO standards, which by default are not open access.
- ysofunny 3y ago
  meaning that in practice we would have to fundamentally tweak how capitalism (maybe?) works somehow in the mean time keep paying taxes, rent, subscription, and utility bills. i'm not even sure it's capitalism that needs to get modified? maybe it's something about how private/public property works that is cleary off the mark and needs updates? I'd argue that in the internet specifically, open sourced implementations of the protocols are the backbone of everything not closed proprietary specs; aren't most internet specifications open?
  - hobofan 3y ago
    In the purest of the pure internet, sure (depending on what level of the stack you look at). There you of course have other problems(?) like the fact that most browser-related standards are essentially steered by Google (via its dominance in browser market share). From the parts of the W3C that I've observed, I'd also not characterize them as a functioning standards body (I'm not sure they've published anything meaningful in the last decade). But in many spaces where you interact with the "real world" you very quickly make contact with proprietary ISO standards (e.g. CAD, architecture). I'd argue that this is one of the big contributing factors to why there isn't more open source penetration in CAD, as central standards like STEP[2] would require contributors to purchase a number of ISO standards. There are also some spaces where proprietary standards exist (usually when open implementations precede the standardized ones) like SQL[0], but the proprietary nature is ignored, as most people don't need their SQL implementations certified. AMD can't do that as they need to keep a friendly relation with the HDMI Forum for official certification. There are also some ISO standards (associated with JTC1) that are open access[1], which seems like a decent model. I'm not sure who usually foots the bill for the whole standardization process here though. [0]: https://www.iso.org/standard/76583.html https://www.iso.org/standard/76583.html [1]: https://standards.iso.org/ittf/PubliclyAvailableStandards/index.html https://standards.iso.org/ittf/PubliclyAvailableStandards/in... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_10303 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_10303
delta_p_delta_x 3y ago
> proprietary formats and specifications such as ... DisplayPort DisplayPort is not proprietary; it is a VESA standard. > Lightning If you owned any iPhone between 2012 and the present, you had to use Lightning, without choice. And for some inexplicable reason, Americans love iPhones.
- QuadmasterXLII 3y ago
  People keep iphones for a long time. My unfair internal impression is that android phones still have micro-usb and allow any app to change your lockscreen to porn ads without identifying _which_ app made the change, because when I switched to iOS that was true, and I’ve only had two iphones so it can’t have been that long. (In reality it’s been eight years)
  - orangeboats 3y ago
    8 years is a long time in tech. Type-C ports are now commonplace in the Android world. The modern Android ecosystem is no longer the chaotic mess we saw during the Android 2.x era -- its permission system is a lot more complete now, and many features are locked down by default unless you explicit grant the applications permissions to use them.
  - happymellon 3y ago
    > allow any app to change your lockscreen to porn ads I have never heard of such a thing. Was it a common problem for you?
    - QuadmasterXLII 3y ago
      It was a moment in time https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/143330/what-is-this-lock-screen-with-ads-and-how-do-i-remove-it https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/143330/what-is-t... Etc
  - eertami 3y ago
    People keep all phones for a really long time. I've never had a phone that I didn't use for 5 years, nor one that ever cost more than $350.
croes 3y ago
An open standard is pretty useless without hardware that uses it. The makers of proprietary formats know how to prevent that.
helsinkiandrew 3y ago
> Aren't we able to create and use open standards? You can, but you need monitor/graphics chip companies to use it. These are mostly the members/creators of the HDMI standard, they are also probably the best able to create a standard that others will use: https://hdmiforum.org/members/ https://hdmiforum.org/members/

The question is why do we use proprietary formats and specifications such as HDMI, DisplayPort, Thunderbolt, Lightning. Aren't we able to create and use open standards?

salviati 3y ago

It sounds like you're not aware of the reason. I personally believe that the reson is that there are many entities pushing against open standards since they would make copying easier and DRM harder.

mglz 3y ago
This is correct. That's also why there is an ongoing trend to push users into walled gardens and onto hardware they do not control. Or as Cory Doctorow calls it the "war on general-purpose computing"
- toxik 3y ago
  It's a battle for the control of the device. The ideal setup for the big corpos is that we do not own our devices, but we rent them, and they can then charge arbitrarily for different uses of them. This was what AT&T did with phones back in the day.
  - tomohawk 3y ago
    To expand on that, AT&T had a regulated monopoly. You were not allowed to attach non AT&T devices to their network, and they had the only network (and no one else could set one up by law). You did not own a phone, but leased it on a monthly basis. When the telephone answering machine was invented (not by AT&T) you could not legally attach it. The plus of this arrangement was that AT&T made devices that would last for decades, all areas of the country got service (regardless of wealth or population density or politics), and costs were not surprising. The minus of this arrangement was that innovation was stifled and some costs were artificially high. It became a competitive disadvantage that was holding our country back from innovation. There is a correlated timeframe between the breakup of AT&T and the massive expansion of the computer industry.
    - indymike 3y ago
      > costs were not surprising Costs were mind boggling and surprising. I got in huge trouble when I was in elementary school because I called my best friend who lived 1 mile away. It could cost more to call someone who lived in a different LATA (in my case, the other LATA was one mile away) than it did to call a different time zone. As I recall a call 1 mile away was billed at 23¢ per minute and a call to Portland, Oregon, three time zones away was 12¢ per minute (and this was in 1977 money, which where one dollar was worth six hamburgers). Another: the cost to rent a handset was $3 per month. By 1988 (and $1 was worth four hamburgers), you could buy a touch tone phone for $3 at Target.
      - tomohawk 3y ago
        Absolutely right - I'd forgotten about that. The fun of regulation driven services.
DeathArrow 3y ago
Limiting choice and freedom is never a good answer to an issue.

hobofan 3y ago

> Aren't we able to create and use open standards? In theory, sure. In practice you'll have to construct a financially sustainable organization that is able to motivate all interested parties to chip in and is also able to certify the implementation and at the same time also doesn't fall victim to internal corruption (e.g. high C-level compensation making it unsustainable). I think there are few-to-no precedents for that in the open source space in general, and even less when it comes to standards body organizations for maintaining a standard at that level of complexity. In most domains proprietary specifications form the backbone of everything. A lot of governments refer to ISO standards, which by default are not open access.

ysofunny 3y ago
meaning that in practice we would have to fundamentally tweak how capitalism (maybe?) works somehow in the mean time keep paying taxes, rent, subscription, and utility bills. i'm not even sure it's capitalism that needs to get modified? maybe it's something about how private/public property works that is cleary off the mark and needs updates? I'd argue that in the internet specifically, open sourced implementations of the protocols are the backbone of everything not closed proprietary specs; aren't most internet specifications open?
- hobofan 3y ago
  In the purest of the pure internet, sure (depending on what level of the stack you look at). There you of course have other problems(?) like the fact that most browser-related standards are essentially steered by Google (via its dominance in browser market share). From the parts of the W3C that I've observed, I'd also not characterize them as a functioning standards body (I'm not sure they've published anything meaningful in the last decade). But in many spaces where you interact with the "real world" you very quickly make contact with proprietary ISO standards (e.g. CAD, architecture). I'd argue that this is one of the big contributing factors to why there isn't more open source penetration in CAD, as central standards like STEP[2] would require contributors to purchase a number of ISO standards. There are also some spaces where proprietary standards exist (usually when open implementations precede the standardized ones) like SQL[0], but the proprietary nature is ignored, as most people don't need their SQL implementations certified. AMD can't do that as they need to keep a friendly relation with the HDMI Forum for official certification. There are also some ISO standards (associated with JTC1) that are open access[1], which seems like a decent model. I'm not sure who usually foots the bill for the whole standardization process here though. [0]: https://www.iso.org/standard/76583.html https://www.iso.org/standard/76583.html [1]: https://standards.iso.org/ittf/PubliclyAvailableStandards/index.html https://standards.iso.org/ittf/PubliclyAvailableStandards/in... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_10303 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_10303

delta_p_delta_x 3y ago

> proprietary formats and specifications such as ... DisplayPort DisplayPort is not proprietary; it is a VESA standard. > Lightning If you owned any iPhone between 2012 and the present, you had to use Lightning, without choice. And for some inexplicable reason, Americans love iPhones.

QuadmasterXLII 3y ago
People keep iphones for a long time. My unfair internal impression is that android phones still have micro-usb and allow any app to change your lockscreen to porn ads without identifying _which_ app made the change, because when I switched to iOS that was true, and I’ve only had two iphones so it can’t have been that long. (In reality it’s been eight years)
- orangeboats 3y ago
  8 years is a long time in tech. Type-C ports are now commonplace in the Android world. The modern Android ecosystem is no longer the chaotic mess we saw during the Android 2.x era -- its permission system is a lot more complete now, and many features are locked down by default unless you explicit grant the applications permissions to use them.
- happymellon 3y ago
  > allow any app to change your lockscreen to porn ads I have never heard of such a thing. Was it a common problem for you?
  - QuadmasterXLII 3y ago
    It was a moment in time https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/143330/what-is-this-lock-screen-with-ads-and-how-do-i-remove-it https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/143330/what-is-t... Etc
- eertami 3y ago
  People keep all phones for a really long time. I've never had a phone that I didn't use for 5 years, nor one that ever cost more than $350.

croes 3y ago

An open standard is pretty useless without hardware that uses it. The makers of proprietary formats know how to prevent that.

helsinkiandrew 3y ago

> Aren't we able to create and use open standards? You can, but you need monitor/graphics chip companies to use it. These are mostly the members/creators of the HDMI standard, they are also probably the best able to create a standard that others will use: https://hdmiforum.org/members/ https://hdmiforum.org/members/