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I don't understand why any standards body would consider not doing this as a default.
by geerlingguy 4mo ago
I don't understand why any standards body would consider not doing this as a default.
- happytoexplain 4mo agoI don't think the benefits of charging for your work are mysterious. It's reasonable to believe that certain works should not be behind paywalls, but not understanding is kind of a confusing stance.
- geerlingguy 4mo agoIf your entire goal is to create a standard... it seems like giving anyone access to the materials needed to _adhere_ to said standard is prerequisite. Unless the goal is not to create standards, but instead to control access to said standard.
- btown 4mo agoBoth can be true. Promoting a standard isn’t free, and having licensing and certification fees, especially in an industry where such practices make a standardization org get taken more seriously, is a reasonable strategy. We’re lucky that our industry moved in a different direction!
- dare944 4mo agoIP licensing and certification are entirely separate from access to standards documentation. Of course certifying conformance to a standard is going to have a cost. But publishing documentation that has already been written is effectively free.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- stogot 4mo agoIt’s a proprietary standard moving to an open standard
- andrewaylett 4mo agoThe people requiring adherence to a specific standard are not the people who then need to pay to see what they're supposed to be adhering to :(. Strictly, just because the standard costs money doesn't mean that the information within it is otherwise unavailable. The C++ spec is an amusing example of this: the actual spec costs $$$, but the final draft is freely available. I can't imagine they sell many copies. I know that back when I was employed to work on a C++ compiler I only had access to the draft. If demonstrating conformance is important, I suspect that the cost of access to specifications is only going to be a small fraction of the cost of certification. And as I understand things, it's certification that's the target of charging for specifications.
- thx67 4mo agoIn the world they operated in when this started was in a big corporate environment, gatekeeping was a feature. Anyone who needed a standard could already get it for free through their companies records department. At my first corporate job the first thing I did was checkout and read all the MPEG standards. But I agree, the whale we need to go after is IEEE.
- wowczarek 4mo ago> the whale we need to go after is IEEE. I wholeheartedly second this. I'm an individual member and a member of a specific IEEE society that sponsors a specific standard and I still have to pay for a copy. In contrast, the same standard has been adapted for specific industries and there are IEC, ITU and a SMPTE specs adopting it and those I can get for free. Doubly irritating because some of the most crucial standards like the 802 family are all paywalled. And it's not like it's warranted because if I need a standard I'm probably a vendor. Take high-speed Ethernet for example, there is such a proliferation of media types, lane counts, line encodings, FEC options and speed combinations that an engineer needs a reference from the source, and instead it's either third-party information or "stolen" PDFs.
- thx67 4mo agoThe whole world benefits when our infrastructure can stay on spec and those specs are freely available for everyone. Specs are the vaccines holding civilization together.
- namibj 4mo agoA good chunk of 802 is not paywalled for individuals, notably at least 802.3 and 802.15.4, which I read good chunks of.
- duped 4mo agoI think people have a flipped understanding of how these standards come to be. They don't gather industry experts in a conference room and whiteboard out a perfect design that everyone agrees on and then go off to build products. What happens is that companies develop products and services, and at some point it becomes more useful for those products to inter operate and protocols/interfaces between them need to be agreed upon. Oftentimes it's the mutant bastard children of the existing approaches by multiple stakeholders, encumbered by patents and legacy. Adherence to a standard is not the goal, defining interoperability between existing systems is. And everyone participating is already a paying member of SMPTE.
- plorkyeran 4mo agoI have written software which needed to support SMPTE standards, and to do so I pirated the standard. The standards are initially written to reflect existing systems, but then more systems are developed later.
- duped 4mo agoWhy didn't you get your company to pay for it?
- asdcplib 4mo agoThis is mostly true, with some exceptions. The Digital Cinema standards (428, 429, 430, etc.) were in fact developed in conference rooms and on whiteboards. It was a greenfield application with no incumbent formats.
- RossBencina 4mo agoI think you are mostly correct. However if we expand beyond SMPTE to ISO, the modern C++ standards process provides a counterexample.
- cortesoft 4mo agoI am not sure if this is what happens, but I could imagine an arrangement where you have a standard, and in order to advertise that you meet the standard, you are required to pay a fee to the standards body, and that fee is used to fund an audit to verify that you adhere to the standard. It would be nice if, for example, USB did this so that I know a USB cable actually works with a specific standard before I buy it.
- AlotOfReading 4mo agoUSB-IF does in fact do this and has for years. Certified devices are allowed to have a "Certified USB" logo somewhere on them, usually placed next to the regulatory compliance marks.
- seanhunter 4mo agoThere was a time when buying the Ansi C standard cost over $200 but you could get Herb Schildt’s “Annotated Ansi C Standard” for $20, which some said reflected the value he added to the process.
- jjmarr 4mo agoBuying the ANSI C standard still costs about $300. Same for C++. https://webstore.ansi.org/standards/iso/isoiec98992024?source=blog&_gl=1*wv2y6w*_gcl_au*MTcwNjY2NjA0Mi4xNzgxOTc4NDM2 https://webstore.ansi.org/standards/iso/isoiec98992024?sourc... Nobody does it. gcc/clang implement it from the "drafts", which are published online due to the need to discuss them prior to standardization.
- Tomte 4mo agoIt used to be 18 dollars in the ANSI webstore for quite some time. Also, you can look at smaller European countries putting their national cover page on it, and selling it cheaper. It’s the same standard, in English. The C standard is only a bit cheaper at the Lithuanian agency: https://eshop.lsd.lt/public#!/product/info/0a640332-9273-1660-8193-2b97ec25036e https://eshop.lsd.lt/public#!/product/info/0a640332-9273-166... Sometimes it‘s much cheaper: the Germans sell IEC 62443-4-2 for 400 Euros, the Estonians for 40 Euros: https://www.dinmedia.de/de/norm/csa-iec-62443-4-2/331021994?queryId=2551d816a233864f03f8c88e3430e597&indexName=prod_dinmedia_products&position=2 https://www.dinmedia.de/de/norm/csa-iec-62443-4-2/331021994?... https://www.evs.ee/et/evs-en-iec-62443-4-2-2019 https://www.evs.ee/et/evs-en-iec-62443-4-2-2019
- _kst_ 4mo agoStrictly speaking it's the ISO C standard. ISO issues each new edition of the standard, and ANSI adopts it. This was reversed for the first standard, which ANSI published in 1989; ISO adopted it, with editorial changes, in 1990. The term "ANSI C" usually (not entirely correctly) refers to the 1989 standard. If you want to refer to a particular version, it's best to refer to "ISO C" and the date (1990, 1999, 2011, 2023). The money you pay for a copy of the standard doesn't go to the people who do the work of writing it, who are either volunteers or paid by their employers.
- lars_francke 4mo agoAs someone working in standardization: I don't know any standardization organization where the people doing the actual work of writing standards are paid for their work. I certainly am not. In the organizations I know - including ISO - the money is basically exclusively spent on "overhead".
- gwerbin 4mo agoIs "overhead" a euphemism for administrator salaries?
- lars_francke 4mo agoPartially. Yes. Look at the budgets of these orgs and you'll see what I mean. I use the term similar to who it's used for non-profit. The orgs I'm involved with are almost exclusively not involved in the actual standards creation. If the secretariats were to shut down tomorrow I'd say the actual work on the standards could continue without anyone noticing. There is a reason that at least the EU is considering modernizing the system. https://single-market-economy.ec.europa.eu/consultations/public-consultation-proposal-revision-regulation-eu-no-10252012-also-called-eu-standardisation_en https://single-market-economy.ec.europa.eu/consultations/pub... ISO, CEN, CENELEC, ETSI are stuck very much in the past. So yes. Overhead.
- JdeBP 4mo agoNo. In such organizations the money goes towards all of the usual things such as tax, building rental, utilities, and licences, as well as employee salaries and social security contributions. BSI Group, for example, paid 26.1% tax (25% corporation tax plus some other stuff) according to its 2025 financial statement. In my direct experience, the people who write the standard texts get a room to sit in, power for laptops, a whiteboard, and tea/coffee and biscuits, a few days per year.
- cortesoft 4mo agoIt costs money to operate a website, too.
- deleted 4mo ago
- PaulHoule 4mo agoWell, for ISO it is a business model. And for a lot of standards which have limited interest in a certain industry and you are probably going to spend $2000 on gear to make measurements compatible with the standard it is not so bad to spend 133 CHF on something. On the other hand I served on a committee and wrote a technical report that costs 133 CHF and personally I'm a bit annoyed that (1) I can't send you a link to read it for free and (2) a friend of mine who worked for the US government and is the only person I ever met who knew how to do complex modelling in OWL couldn't contribute her writing to it because everything US government employees write is supposed to be public domain.
- rjsw 4mo agoPeople at NIST contribute to ISO standards.
- cpgxiii 4mo agoBecause these bodies want to maintain a moat for the products made by member companies. No more, no less. A great example of this is the GigE Vision/GenICam standards that are used by basically all machine vision cameras, which were accessible to non-licensees but not usefully implementable (these standards explicitly prohibited their use in implementing any open source implementation of the standards). So essentially all they could be used for were (1) as a licensee producing closed-source software for their own cameras, or (2) you as customer trying to complain to your camera/software vendor that they failed to implement some part of the standard correctly.
- bborud 4mo agoThis even extends to how some standards are written: deliberately complex and poor work just to make it frustrating and ensure a high barrier of entry. And of course there are either no test suites or testing against them costs a fortune. This is the kind of thing politicians in a reasonable world would make illegal and subject to sanctions.
- kelnos 4mo ago> these standards explicitly prohibited their use in implementing any open source implementation of the standards Is that legally enforceable? IANAL, but that feels dubious to me. Feels like there should be a way around that.
- NoahZuniga 4mo agoprobably enforceable via patents.
- 0xbadcafebee 4mo agoIf you make a thing and copyright it, you get to dictate terms. But the legal alternative would be a clean room implementation. The implementation team never saw the standard, so it's not being used.
- cpgxiii 4mo ago
- asdcplib 4mo agoOnce upon a time, acquiring a standard involved writing to a far away address and then waiting "six to eight weeks" for a paper document to show up in your mailbox. By 1995 (when internet access became common) SMPTE was seventy years old. Certain, uh, expectations had become concretized by then, and it took considerable time and effort to overcome those.
- kyrra 4mo agoConstruction codes are still pay walled. NEC (electric) is $170: https://www.nfpa.org/product/nfpa-70-national-electrical-code-nec/p0070code https://www.nfpa.org/product/nfpa-70-national-electrical-cod... IPC (plumbing) is $130: https://webstore.ansi.org/standards/icc/iccipc2024 https://webstore.ansi.org/standards/icc/iccipc2024 And there are many others. (I will say the YC company https://up.codes/ https://up.codes/ makes these much more accessible, and deals with local variants to these regulations)
- ai_fry_ur_brain 4mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- defgeneric 4mo agoA justification for this would be: states choose these providers to accurately present building codes (keeping up with the right versions/revisions is a lot of work, etc) because there's risk in simply publishing the PDFs and leaving it to basically anyone to curate. But the providers (like ICC) also tend to lock these deals in with state laws (not sure if they lobby for it, but I would imagine they do). When you think about who needs to have access to the correct and current building code or electric code or whatever for regular reference, it's really your lawyer, plumber, electrician, architect, builder, etc. and in that context $170 or $130 isn't a bad deal.
- kyrra 4mo agoIt also locks up things for homeowners that want to DIY a solution fixing a house. Obviously people fix things without looking at the codes (and there are plenty of horror stories out there), but if we opened up house codes for people to actually look at and refer to, homeowners could potentially better find how to do things properly, especially with AI.
- 0xbadcafebee 4mo ago
- clickety_clack 4mo agoBack in the day when I was doing this kind of thing, we had to buy a whole load of British Standards. They are £100s each, and they each cover a small part of work. If you’re designing steel structures you need one for basic structural design, one for loads on structures, one for steel structural design, one for the steel sections themselves, one for foundation design, one for execution of steel structures, and many many more. It’s thousands of pounds.
- kazinator 4mo agoSometimes standards bodies are formed by an oligarchy of industry players who have decided that their businesses would be simplified by mutual interoperability. They have no interest in lowering any bar of entry for other players though; certainly, they don't care about some hobbyist who balks at forking up $300 for a document.
- kelnos 4mo agoTo be fair, though, $300 is a pretty low bar. Certainly for any company, but even for a decent chunk of hobbyists who are really into building something. Even a few thousand dollars isn't much of a barrier for a company that wants to build a product.
- RetroTechie 4mo ago> To be fair, though, $300 is a pretty low bar. What? You mean it's reasonable for a DIYer to cough up $300 just to find out what's the current standard for say, color coding wires on an AC outlet?
- kazinator 4mo agoIf you need multiple standards, it adds up quickly.
- SideQuark 4mo agoBecause it costs a massive amount to get standards with this technical quality. They go through meetings, have a decent amount of staff to run, organize, have conference costs (locations...), take years to get done. Someone has to pay for this. Making companies (and often, many of the individual members do this out of their own pocket) pay it all means worse standards, as some people stop going. Sharing the cost to make the standard makes it a better mix of getting good standards and having low costs for final users.
- mananaysiempre 4mo agoI don’t know how SMPTE works, but ISO meeting participants are, famously, unpaid volunteers. Or perhaps I should rather say negatively paid, as it costs money to participate in (more than one) meeting.
- Ekaros 4mo agoYou have to fund the local national body tracking these and distribution and so on. Bigger thing back in the day of physical copies. Which involved real costs. Just imagine allowing anyone to order free paper... Only EU does that... So then next question who should fund whole thing? Tax payers or the companies which is vast majority of users. Well self-funding organisation sounds really good for politicians. Move the costs to companies. Thus paid standards.