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Ask HN: Why are ISO standards so expensive?

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

#61

Post by SahAssar »

tracker1 wrote: post #52
michaelt wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do ISO handle proofreading, editing and so on? My impression was that they mostly did publishing, which has become less and less of a cost center.

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

#62

Post by tombert »

pcwalton wrote: post #58
rayiner wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's even worse than that; the way you end up getting a license to these patented codecs (that are now part of the standard), you end up buying access to codec pools from groups like MPEG-LA. This isn't inherently bad, but the price of buying a license to these pools doesn't typically decrease, even when some (or most) of the patents in that pool expire.

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

#63

Post by [deleted] »

tinus_hn wrote: post #26
octocode wrote: post #3

The fee is to pay for the ISO's operating costs of maintaining and distributing the standards. They do have a section of publicly available standards, if you're interested: https://standards.iso.org/ittf/PubliclyAvailableStandards/

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.

[deleted]

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

#64

Post by UglyToad »

bbatha wrote: post #13

Its also worth noting that you can basically find all of the standards in their draft forms for free. You need to be slightly careful about the revision numbers, but often the drafts are identical to the ISO ones. You really only need to pay for the draft if you want to be certified as in compliance or are an enterprise user. In which case the fee is paltry.

Is there a way to search for these? I've tried trawling through many sites to find draft versions of ISO 32000-2:2017 but it seems to have fallen down a memory hole. Is there a naming convention around drafts or is it just luck of the draw?

Apologies is this is not a valid query.

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

#65

Post by wolfgke »

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...

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

The problem is: the time when people learn most about programming is as students when they have too much time and hardly any money.

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

#66

Post by la_barba »

jjoonathan wrote: post #54
theincredulousk wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"What they should be" is always an arguable position. We can only hold them accountable to their own charter.

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

#67

Post by la_barba »

I view ISO standards as a tax on companies who are willing to stand by their product and processes. Modulo obvious caveats, if they can get certification/compliance/accreditation , the end user can have a modicum of confidence when dealing with the business. It lets you buy toys for your child with a peace of mind, or get into a car with ISO certified airbags, or buy network equipment for your server build, etc etc. Its trivial to point out flaws in any system, its not easy to propose something better that you can actually implement in the real world.

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

#69

Post by la_barba »

dwheeler wrote: post #43

Because ISO likes free money. In most cases ISO doesn't pay the authors and reviewers of standards, so instead of posting the document for free, it gets to indefinitely receive 100% of the profit from the work. It's a sweet deal for ISO, and a terrible deal for the rest of the world. ISO's paywall makes it very difficult to apply their standards. It's essentially an anti-standardization stance, not what you'd expect…

>Today many people's expectation is that a standards body will make the standards freely available, since there's no excuse to do otherwise.

How many people have this expectation and how do you know?

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

#70

Post by radford-neal »

andrewaylett wrote: post #9

I've been part of a team developing C++ compilers and run-time libraries. We used the final draft, which (at least for C++) is freely available. I suspect anyone relying on the final text (were it to differ from the last public draft) would be disappointed to discover that pretty much no-one uses it. It doesn't seem to me to be a terrible trade-off to say that ad-hoc use via public drafts is fine, but if you need to…

... anyone relying on the final text... would be disappointed to discover that pretty much no-one uses it.

Indeed! A "standard" that costs $100 to read is not actually a standard at all. The standard is, by definition, what the users think it is.

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