Ask HN: Why are ISO standards so expensive? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Why are ISO standards so expensive?

#51

Post by tracker1 » Thu, Jun 13, 2019, 5:40 PM UTC

w8rbt wrote: post #48

When you do buy an individual copy, it comes with your name printed in the footer of every page. I had a copy of one once (won't say which one) and I could not let my boss read it. For many topics, national standards (like NIST) are great. They are free too. Edit: We went with individual purchases because the group license was way too expensive. Had we paid for that, then we could have shared the docs with upto X emp…

I'm not sure how they can restrict you from lending such things, unless you've signed a contract specifically saying so. Copyright cannot be used that way, at least in the US.

Re: Ask HN: Why are ISO standards so expensive?

#52

Post by tracker1 » Thu, Jun 13, 2019, 5:42 PM UTC

michaelt wrote: post #30

tinus_hn wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They probably have a gold web server that can only be powered by the tears of albino giraffes. For the price they charge for distributing one standard once, normal organizations can distribute files to anyone who asks essentially forever.

I suspect (although I've made no effort to verify this) that some standards organisations were set up in the days of paper copies and secretaries and typists, when they needed a 10-storey office building [1]. So naturally they set up a pricing structure reflecting those expenses. Then they kept the employee numbers and pricing structure due to institutional inertia. [1] https://goo.gl/maps/MK3C9AUgzV16Svem8

There's more to an organizations overhead than just the web servers. There's staff, reviewers, publishers, editors, etc. Of course, it's probably still most likely over-priced, and I have no insight into ISO's operational funding or internals.

Re: Ask HN: Why are ISO standards so expensive?

#53

Post by jjoonathan » Thu, Jun 13, 2019, 5:47 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #49

jjoonathan wrote: post #4

Many other standards organizations have figured out funding models that don't shut out hobbyists, the interested public, academics, and professionals with tangential (rather than direct, funded) interest. ISO has not. They are behind the times in this regard.

Like W3C? “Standards” funded by Google’s ad monopoly? How is that going for them? The demand for everything to be “free” is destroying the idea of neutral standard. Standard must be funded somehow. The ISO model has worked for decades. The W3C model, where you don’t charge for either the standard or the products, has become a tire fire.

Open standards organizations in general and the W3C in particular were in full swing long before Google existed and will continue to do meaningful work long after Google's ad monopoly gets broken up or disrupted into irrelevance.

It takes a special kind of singlemindedness to look at modern web standards and the open source WebKit ecosystem, dismiss their wild, outsized success as a tire fire, and call for more corporate exclusivity as the solution.

Re: Ask HN: Why are ISO standards so expensive?

#54

Post by jjoonathan » Thu, Jun 13, 2019, 5:57 PM UTC

theincredulousk wrote: post #31

kierank wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ISO is full of vested interests that don't want hobbyists, the interested public, academics, and professionals to access the documents and be able to implement them at a lower cost.

I don't think $100 can really be considered a major roadblock to any technology professional capable of doing a standardized implementation...

$100 isn't a roadblock to a funded implementation effort, but that's not the only meaningful interaction a functioning society can or should have with a standard. $100 is a large roadblock to many other types of meaningful interaction.

Re: Ask HN: Why are ISO standards so expensive?

#55

Post by jetti » Thu, Jun 13, 2019, 7:51 PM UTC

jjoonathan wrote: post #4

Many other standards organizations have figured out funding models that don't shut out hobbyists, the interested public, academics, and professionals with tangential (rather than direct, funded) interest. ISO has not. They are behind the times in this regard.

Do you have examples of those standards organizations? The only other one that I have first hand experience with is ANSI and I know they charge for their standards. I have been dealing with X12 EDI and some of the standards for that are close to $1000 and that is for a single file format. The health care X12 standard has dozens of file format standards.

Re: Ask HN: Why are ISO standards so expensive?

#56

Post by dragonwriter » Thu, Jun 13, 2019, 7:53 PM UTC

jetti wrote: post #55

jjoonathan wrote: post #4

Many other standards organizations have figured out funding models that don't shut out hobbyists, the interested public, academics, and professionals with tangential (rather than direct, funded) interest. ISO has not. They are behind the times in this regard.

Do you have examples of those standards organizations? The only other one that I have first hand experience with is ANSI and I know they charge for their standards. I have been dealing with X12 EDI and some of the standards for that are close to $1000 and that is for a single file format. The health care X12 standard has dozens of file format standards.

> Do you have examples of those standards organizations?

WHATWG, IETF, W3C. Not that each doesn't have other issues, but charging through the nose for standards isn't one of them.

Re: Ask HN: Why are ISO standards so expensive?

#57

Post by jetti » Thu, Jun 13, 2019, 8:14 PM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #56

jetti wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have examples of those standards organizations? The only other one that I have first hand experience with is ANSI and I know they charge for their standards. I have been dealing with X12 EDI and some of the standards for that are close to $1000 and that is for a single file format. The health care X12 standard has dozens of file format standards.

> Do you have examples of those standards organizations? WHATWG, IETF, W3C. Not that each doesn't have other issues, but charging through the nose for standards isn't one of them.

Thanks. I'm not sure why I was blanking on IETF and W3C. I was not familiar with WHATWG.

Re: Ask HN: Why are ISO standards so expensive?

#58

Post by pcwalton » Thu, Jun 13, 2019, 8:14 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #49

jjoonathan wrote: post #4

Many other standards organizations have figured out funding models that don't shut out hobbyists, the interested public, academics, and professionals with tangential (rather than direct, funded) interest. ISO has not. They are behind the times in this regard.

Like W3C? “Standards” funded by Google’s ad monopoly? How is that going for them? The demand for everything to be “free” is destroying the idea of neutral standard. Standard must be funded somehow. The ISO model has worked for decades. The W3C model, where you don’t charge for either the standard or the products, has become a tire fire.

The W3C's failures pale in comparison to what I hear of the ISO MPEG process, in which companies compete to put as much of their patented technology in the codec standard as possible without any regard for coherence. ISO is worse than the W3C.

Re: Ask HN: Why are ISO standards so expensive?

#59

Post by NikkiA » Thu, Jun 13, 2019, 8:16 PM UTC

arm wrote: post #47

danmg wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

hard to search for since they're numbered, and people collect the ones that are relevant to them personally

Unfortunately, that torrent doesn’t seem to include all the standards. For example, none of these seem to be included: http://www.open-std.org/JTC1/SC35/WG1/

If you still have it, can you check for ISO-1000 being there?

Re: Ask HN: Why are ISO standards so expensive?

#60

Post by SahAssar » Thu, Jun 13, 2019, 8:37 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #49

jjoonathan wrote: post #4

Many other standards organizations have figured out funding models that don't shut out hobbyists, the interested public, academics, and professionals with tangential (rather than direct, funded) interest. ISO has not. They are behind the times in this regard.

Like W3C? “Standards” funded by Google’s ad monopoly? How is that going for them? The demand for everything to be “free” is destroying the idea of neutral standard. Standard must be funded somehow. The ISO model has worked for decades. The W3C model, where you don’t charge for either the standard or the products, has become a tire fire.

Just because the standard is free does not mean that any single implementation is, you are free to charge for software implementing a standard just as you would be otherwise.

A proper standard needs to be free (both as in speech and beer), otherwise it needs investment to see that a implementation meets the standard (which in itself goes against the idea of having standards) or to modify it to propose improvements.

The work of developing standards can be done by people/companies who benefit from the standard, either financially or via other ways and those people/companies have their motivations to work on it.