I don't understand why any standards body would consider not doing this as a default.
Once 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 <i>seventy</i> years old. Certain, uh, expectations had become concretized by then, and it took considerable time and effort to overcome those.
Construction codes are still pay walled.<p>NEC (electric) is $170: <a href="https://www.nfpa.org/product/nfpa-70-national-electrical-code-nec/p0070code" rel="nofollow">https://www.nfpa.org/product/nfpa-70-national-electrical-cod...</a><p>IPC (plumbing) is $130: <a href="https://webstore.ansi.org/standards/icc/iccipc2024" rel="nofollow">https://webstore.ansi.org/standards/icc/iccipc2024</a><p>And there are many others.<p>(I will say the YC company <a href="https://up.codes/" rel="nofollow">https://up.codes/</a> makes these much more accessible, and deals with local variants to these regulations)
A 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 <i>regular reference</i>, it's really your lawyer, plumber, electrician, architect, builder, etc. and in that context $170 or $130 isn't a bad deal.
It 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.
This would potentially lead to a whole lot of injured people. There are already DIY jobs that are safe for homeowners to do. But some really should be done by a professional.<p>It's one thing to make the POP3 standard free; worst case your mail gets lost. It's another to make the standard for the electrical code free, so that people can incorrectly implement its quite complicated rules, and result in things like fires and electrocution.
> especially with AI.<p>While AI models still hallucinate commonly, this might not be the best use of it.<p>The downsides of the occasional hallucinated answer for building standards seems like it could be pretty bad. Seems much worse than the upsides?
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Because 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.<p>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.<p>Sharing the cost to make the standard makes it a better mix of getting good standards and having low costs for final users.
Because these bodies want to maintain a moat for the products made by member companies. No more, no less.<p>A great example of this is the GigE Vision/GenICam standards that are used by basically all machine vision cameras, which were <i>accessible</i> to non-licensees but not usefully implementable (these standards explicitly <i>prohibited</i> 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.
> <i>these standards explicitly prohibited their use in implementing any open source implementation of the standards</i><p>Is that legally enforceable? IANAL, but that feels dubious to me. Feels like there should be a way around that.
If 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.
Yeah, clean room implementation is the only way - and the route chosen by the aravis project that builds a FOSS implementation (which is a really great piece of software, way nicer to work with and easier to debug than the terrible vendor SDKs).
probably enforceable via patents.
This 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.<p>This is the kind of thing politicians in a reasonable world would make illegal and subject to sanctions.
Back 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.
Sometimes 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.
To 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.<p>Even a few thousand dollars isn't much of a barrier for a company that wants to build a product.
I 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 <i>not understanding</i> is kind of a confusing stance.
There 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.
Buying the ANSI C standard still costs about $300. Same for C++.<p><a href="https://webstore.ansi.org/standards/iso/isoiec98992024?source=blog&_gl=1*wv2y6w*_gcl_au*MTcwNjY2NjA0Mi4xNzgxOTc4NDM2" rel="nofollow">https://webstore.ansi.org/standards/iso/isoiec98992024?sourc...</a><p>Nobody does it. gcc/clang implement it from the "drafts", which are published online due to the need to discuss them prior to standardization.
It used to be 18 dollars in the ANSI webstore for quite some time.<p>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.<p>The C standard is only a bit cheaper at the Lithuanian agency: <a href="https://eshop.lsd.lt/public#!/product/info/0a640332-9273-1660-8193-2b97ec25036e" rel="nofollow">https://eshop.lsd.lt/public#!/product/info/0a640332-9273-166...</a><p>Sometimes it‘s much cheaper: the Germans sell IEC 62443-4-2 for 400 Euros, the Estonians for 40 Euros:<p><a href="https://www.dinmedia.de/de/norm/csa-iec-62443-4-2/331021994?queryId=2551d816a233864f03f8c88e3430e597&indexName=prod_dinmedia_products&position=2" rel="nofollow">https://www.dinmedia.de/de/norm/csa-iec-62443-4-2/331021994?...</a><p><a href="https://www.evs.ee/et/evs-en-iec-62443-4-2-2019" rel="nofollow">https://www.evs.ee/et/evs-en-iec-62443-4-2-2019</a>
Strictly speaking it's the ISO C standard. ISO issues each new edition of the standard, and ANSI adopts it.<p>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).<p>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.
Somewhere along the line, especially with Internet in late 00s people understand the term Open to be the same as Free. When in reality they are not.<p>But now it is all too late to debate and fix this.
Well, 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.<p>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.
If 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.<p>Unless the goal is not to create standards, but instead to control access to said standard.
The 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 :(.<p>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 <i>actual spec</i> 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.<p>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.
In 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.<p>At my first corporate job the first thing I did was checkout and read all the MPEG standards.<p>But I agree, the whale we need to go after is IEEE.
> the whale we need to go after is IEEE.<p>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.
A good chunk of 802 is not paywalled for individuals, notably at least 802.3 and 802.15.4, which I read good chunks of.
The 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.
I 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.<p>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.
Both 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 <i>more</i> seriously, is a reasonable strategy. We’re lucky that our industry moved in a different direction!
I think people have a flipped understanding of how these standards come to be.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Adherence to a standard is not the goal, defining interoperability between existing systems is. And everyone participating is already a paying member of SMPTE.
This 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.
I 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.
I think you are mostly correct. However if we expand beyond SMPTE to ISO, the modern C++ standards process provides a counterexample.
It’s a proprietary standard moving to an open standard
As 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.<p>In the organizations I know - including ISO - the money is basically exclusively spent on "overhead".