7 ms·

We really need to just force all standards organizations to release their standards for free. No making you pay $300 or whatever for a standard. (The PCI SIG ma

by ethin 10mo ago

We really need to just force all standards organizations to release their standards for free. No making you pay $300 or whatever for a standard. (The PCI SIG makes you pay like $5000 for access to the PCIe standard...)

mahkoh 10mo ago
VESA makes you pay $5000 to get legal access to the DisplayPort standard. That is not the issue here.
- ethin 10mo ago
  It is part of the issue here. This specific post is about the HDMI forum having an insanely restrictive NDA, but the broader problem of SDOs charging obscene amounts of money for what amounts to trivially reproduceable digital documents (or taking other measures to do everything they can to seal the standards from the public unless your willing to pay the obscene fees or <insert other absurd measure here>) is relevant to this post, and this comment, since the HDMI forum is doing exactly this kind of gatekeeping; it only differs in form, but not function.
  - jrepinc 10mo ago
    Yeah HDMI Forum shameful behavior in a way reminds me of those evil greedy scientific publishing houses. Standards and science should be open and free as in freedom to access AND implement and not gated behind some obscene monetary or other forms of restrictions, like patents. In this day and age these restrictions have no place and should be abolished.
    - BlueTemplar 10mo ago
      So should HDCP. And DMCA. And platforms. And DRM in general. But this is basically asking for the USA to give up on their soft power (Hollywood, and over the Internet). It's something to aim for, but is still going to take decades. And you have to be careful about what might fill the power void (China, Russia...)
- TheAmazingRace 10mo ago
  Indeed. I'm pretty sure the issue is that the HDMI Consortium wants some kind of royalty for each device sold with a proper HDMI designation, whereas VESA doesn't care if you sell one device or a million devices with DisplayPort. You owe them nothing extra beyond the initial legal access fee. Oh yeah, and the burdensome NDA that the HDMI Consortium requires its partners to agree to is another serious problem for the Linux driver.
- VerifiedReports 10mo ago
  Another example of something that shouldn't be accepted as a standard. If you want to be a standard, then the spec must be published to the public. DUH. It's sad what people put up with now.
williamDafoe 10mo ago
Then you wouldn't have 3G cellular. Or 4G. Or 5G cellular. It costs tens of millions of dollars to drive around san diego in those vans taking traces of a new cellular system design and discovering improvements so that the standard works everywhere else on earth (San Diego is a worst case that's comparable to Hong Kong.). We wouldn't have CDMA cellular. Or LTE cellular. Recall that CDMA cellular was 3x more efficient in bits/second/Hz than 2G/GSM, so that cell phone providers could literally give you a free phone or PAY YOU to throw away your phone and they would still come out ahead, financially.
- forrestthewoods 10mo ago
  > Then you wouldn't have 3G cellular. What does a specification being paywalled vs open have to do 3G cellular existing or not?
- jeffjeffbear 10mo ago
  I don't think the fee to get access to the standard is generating much income for anyone. Most of what your talking about seems to be money made from licensing of the technology, right?
- adrian_b 10mo ago
  Your claim is weird. No standard has ever been developed using money obtained by selling copies of the standard. The kind of work described by you, which is indeed needed for developing a new communication standard cannot be made profitable by selling copies of a text describing its results. If such work provides valuable techniques that are necessary for the implementation of the standard, they are patented and those who want to implement the standard for commercial purposes must license the patents. Any owner of a device that implements a standard has the right to know what the standard does, so all standards should be distributed if not for free only for a small price covering the distribution expenses and not for the prices with many digits that are in use now. The big prices that are requested for certain standards have a single purpose, to protect the incumbent companies from new competitors, or sometimes to prevent the owners of some devices to do whatever they want with what they own. The very high prices that are demanded for many standards nowadays are a recent phenomenon, of the same kind with the fact that nowadays most sellers of electronic devices no longer provide schematics and maintenance manuals for them as it was the rule until a few decades ago, in order to force the owners to either never repair their devices or to repair them at a few authorized repair shops, which do not have competitors. These kinds of harmful behavior of the corporations have been made possible by the lack of adequate legislation for consumer protection, as the legislators in most countries are much less interested in making laws for the benefit of their voters than they are interested in things like facilitating the surveillance of the voters by the government, to prevent any opposition against unpopular measures. In the more distant past, there was no way to download standards over the Internet for a negligible cost, but you could still avoid to pay for a printed standard by consulting it in a public library and making a copy. There were no secret standards that you could not access without paying a yearly subscription of thousands of $, like today.
crest 10mo ago
This fails even at the FRAND level because you're not "allowed" to implement it in open source software.
- MaxBarraclough 10mo ago
  From the article: > At this time an open source HDMI 2.1 implementation is not possible without running afoul of the HDMI Forum requirements. I wonder on what basis. Perhaps an obligation to ensure the software resists reverse-engineering?
  - throwaway2037 10mo ago
    > Perhaps an obligation to ensure the software resists reverse-engineering? I assume that Blu-Ray is similar. As I understand, there are no fully open source implementations of a video decoder for Blu-Ray discs. (Is that still true in 2025?)
    - aleph_minus_one 10mo ago
      > As I understand, there are no fully open source implementations of a video decoder for Blu-Ray discs. (Is that still true in 2025?) As far as I am aware VLC Media Player is capable of playing blu ray dics: > https://www.reddit.com/r/linux4noobs/comments/1ke5ysq/how_to_get_vlc_media_player_to_play_blurays/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linux4noobs/comments/1ke5ysq/how_to... but you have to install some additional files: > https://wiki.videolan.org/VSG:Usage:Blu-ray/ https://wiki.videolan.org/VSG:Usage:Blu-ray/ > https://www.reddit.com/r/linux4noobs/comments/1ke5ysq/comment/mqgerp8/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linux4noobs/comments/1ke5ysq/commen... If this does not satisfy your claim "there are no fully open source implementations of a video decoder for Blu-Ray discs" tell me where I am wrong.
      - throwaway2037 10mo ago
        Hat tip. I was unaware. When I looked deeper, it requires you to supply the encryption keys for each disc. I highly doubt this method is "approved" by the Blu-Ray consortium. I don't even know the legality in highly advanced economies.
all2 10mo ago
These are standard business practices. They own IP. People want to use that IP. They say "pay us X to use our IP". People throw a tantrum because money. Instead, people want to capitalize on someone else's hard work for free. I understand the ideas behind open source, and I think they are excellent. But I also understand that people and the businesses they operate want to make money.
- softfalcon 10mo ago
  When I'm in these situations, I try and put myself into the IP holder's shoes. "if I spent the time, risk, effort, and money to develop the pre-eminent protocol and hardware used by most TV's in the world... would I want to give that work away for free?" I think the answer is probably no for most people. Because most of us are not the IP holder, they think this technology should just be free (as you stated earlier). This lack of empathy and care for others (even IP holders) is largely why these draconian IP rules and contracts exist. It's why there are whole crazy NDAs around the HDMI spec. It's because every time someone is given even a slight look under the covers, they try and steal it, because it's worth a lot of money. This is a nuanced variant of "this is why we can't have nice things" all over again.
  - archagon 10mo ago
    The idea that you can “steal” knowledge and ideas is farcical. One reason why China is so good at iterating rapidly on technology is that this notion of intellectual “property” doesn’t really exist there. Any cool new invention is immediately iterated on by a hundred different makers. And the reason to release a standard is to make your own products better. TVs would be awful if every manufacturer brought their own proprietary video connector to the table, and those manufacturers who grouped together to create a standard would accordingly dominate the market.
    - reactordev 10mo ago
      It’s the same entitlement that determined one could just download all the content available online to train your models against.
VerifiedReports 10mo ago
Exactly. Proprietary, encumbered bullshit shouldn't be accepted as a standard. Period.
sharperguy 10mo ago
Or just repeal the laws that are being used to make them non-free.
dizhn 10mo ago
And you have to keep buying the new version because certification will be based on the latest standard. We have the same thing with ISO and ASME among others in our sector.

by ethin 10mo ago

mahkoh 10mo ago

VESA makes you pay $5000 to get legal access to the DisplayPort standard. That is not the issue here.

ethin 10mo ago
It is part of the issue here. This specific post is about the HDMI forum having an insanely restrictive NDA, but the broader problem of SDOs charging obscene amounts of money for what amounts to trivially reproduceable digital documents (or taking other measures to do everything they can to seal the standards from the public unless your willing to pay the obscene fees or <insert other absurd measure here>) is relevant to this post, and this comment, since the HDMI forum is doing exactly this kind of gatekeeping; it only differs in form, but not function.
- jrepinc 10mo ago
  Yeah HDMI Forum shameful behavior in a way reminds me of those evil greedy scientific publishing houses. Standards and science should be open and free as in freedom to access AND implement and not gated behind some obscene monetary or other forms of restrictions, like patents. In this day and age these restrictions have no place and should be abolished.
  - BlueTemplar 10mo ago
    So should HDCP. And DMCA. And platforms. And DRM in general. But this is basically asking for the USA to give up on their soft power (Hollywood, and over the Internet). It's something to aim for, but is still going to take decades. And you have to be careful about what might fill the power void (China, Russia...)
TheAmazingRace 10mo ago
Indeed. I'm pretty sure the issue is that the HDMI Consortium wants some kind of royalty for each device sold with a proper HDMI designation, whereas VESA doesn't care if you sell one device or a million devices with DisplayPort. You owe them nothing extra beyond the initial legal access fee. Oh yeah, and the burdensome NDA that the HDMI Consortium requires its partners to agree to is another serious problem for the Linux driver.
VerifiedReports 10mo ago
Another example of something that shouldn't be accepted as a standard. If you want to be a standard, then the spec must be published to the public. DUH. It's sad what people put up with now.

williamDafoe 10mo ago

Then you wouldn't have 3G cellular. Or 4G. Or 5G cellular. It costs tens of millions of dollars to drive around san diego in those vans taking traces of a new cellular system design and discovering improvements so that the standard works everywhere else on earth (San Diego is a worst case that's comparable to Hong Kong.). We wouldn't have CDMA cellular. Or LTE cellular. Recall that CDMA cellular was 3x more efficient in bits/second/Hz than 2G/GSM, so that cell phone providers could literally give you a free phone or PAY YOU to throw away your phone and they would still come out ahead, financially.

forrestthewoods 10mo ago
> Then you wouldn't have 3G cellular. What does a specification being paywalled vs open have to do 3G cellular existing or not?
jeffjeffbear 10mo ago
I don't think the fee to get access to the standard is generating much income for anyone. Most of what your talking about seems to be money made from licensing of the technology, right?
adrian_b 10mo ago
Your claim is weird. No standard has ever been developed using money obtained by selling copies of the standard. The kind of work described by you, which is indeed needed for developing a new communication standard cannot be made profitable by selling copies of a text describing its results. If such work provides valuable techniques that are necessary for the implementation of the standard, they are patented and those who want to implement the standard for commercial purposes must license the patents. Any owner of a device that implements a standard has the right to know what the standard does, so all standards should be distributed if not for free only for a small price covering the distribution expenses and not for the prices with many digits that are in use now. The big prices that are requested for certain standards have a single purpose, to protect the incumbent companies from new competitors, or sometimes to prevent the owners of some devices to do whatever they want with what they own. The very high prices that are demanded for many standards nowadays are a recent phenomenon, of the same kind with the fact that nowadays most sellers of electronic devices no longer provide schematics and maintenance manuals for them as it was the rule until a few decades ago, in order to force the owners to either never repair their devices or to repair them at a few authorized repair shops, which do not have competitors. These kinds of harmful behavior of the corporations have been made possible by the lack of adequate legislation for consumer protection, as the legislators in most countries are much less interested in making laws for the benefit of their voters than they are interested in things like facilitating the surveillance of the voters by the government, to prevent any opposition against unpopular measures. In the more distant past, there was no way to download standards over the Internet for a negligible cost, but you could still avoid to pay for a printed standard by consulting it in a public library and making a copy. There were no secret standards that you could not access without paying a yearly subscription of thousands of $, like today.

crest 10mo ago

This fails even at the FRAND level because you're not "allowed" to implement it in open source software.

MaxBarraclough 10mo ago
From the article: > At this time an open source HDMI 2.1 implementation is not possible without running afoul of the HDMI Forum requirements. I wonder on what basis. Perhaps an obligation to ensure the software resists reverse-engineering?
- throwaway2037 10mo ago
  > Perhaps an obligation to ensure the software resists reverse-engineering? I assume that Blu-Ray is similar. As I understand, there are no fully open source implementations of a video decoder for Blu-Ray discs. (Is that still true in 2025?)
  - aleph_minus_one 10mo ago
    > As I understand, there are no fully open source implementations of a video decoder for Blu-Ray discs. (Is that still true in 2025?) As far as I am aware VLC Media Player is capable of playing blu ray dics: > https://www.reddit.com/r/linux4noobs/comments/1ke5ysq/how_to_get_vlc_media_player_to_play_blurays/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linux4noobs/comments/1ke5ysq/how_to... but you have to install some additional files: > https://wiki.videolan.org/VSG:Usage:Blu-ray/ https://wiki.videolan.org/VSG:Usage:Blu-ray/ > https://www.reddit.com/r/linux4noobs/comments/1ke5ysq/comment/mqgerp8/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linux4noobs/comments/1ke5ysq/commen... If this does not satisfy your claim "there are no fully open source implementations of a video decoder for Blu-Ray discs" tell me where I am wrong.
    - throwaway2037 10mo ago
      Hat tip. I was unaware. When I looked deeper, it requires you to supply the encryption keys for each disc. I highly doubt this method is "approved" by the Blu-Ray consortium. I don't even know the legality in highly advanced economies.

all2 10mo ago

These are standard business practices. They own IP. People want to use that IP. They say "pay us X to use our IP". People throw a tantrum because money. Instead, people want to capitalize on someone else's hard work for free. I understand the ideas behind open source, and I think they are excellent. But I also understand that people and the businesses they operate want to make money.

softfalcon 10mo ago
When I'm in these situations, I try and put myself into the IP holder's shoes. "if I spent the time, risk, effort, and money to develop the pre-eminent protocol and hardware used by most TV's in the world... would I want to give that work away for free?" I think the answer is probably no for most people. Because most of us are not the IP holder, they think this technology should just be free (as you stated earlier). This lack of empathy and care for others (even IP holders) is largely why these draconian IP rules and contracts exist. It's why there are whole crazy NDAs around the HDMI spec. It's because every time someone is given even a slight look under the covers, they try and steal it, because it's worth a lot of money. This is a nuanced variant of "this is why we can't have nice things" all over again.
- archagon 10mo ago
  The idea that you can “steal” knowledge and ideas is farcical. One reason why China is so good at iterating rapidly on technology is that this notion of intellectual “property” doesn’t really exist there. Any cool new invention is immediately iterated on by a hundred different makers. And the reason to release a standard is to make your own products better. TVs would be awful if every manufacturer brought their own proprietary video connector to the table, and those manufacturers who grouped together to create a standard would accordingly dominate the market.
  - reactordev 10mo ago
    It’s the same entitlement that determined one could just download all the content available online to train your models against.

VerifiedReports 10mo ago

Exactly. Proprietary, encumbered bullshit shouldn't be accepted as a standard. Period.

sharperguy 10mo ago

Or just repeal the laws that are being used to make them non-free.

dizhn 10mo ago

And you have to keep buying the new version because certification will be based on the latest standard. We have the same thing with ISO and ASME among others in our sector.