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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?

#71
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...

There's no driver for XQD cards in Linux because of a $100 specification for example

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

#72
post #44

Usual parasite approach. Accessing standards should for sure be free for everyone.

Why should it be free? What is your rationale?

Because standards are not products. They should enable things, not to be used for profit. Profiteering from that hinders progress. It should be quite self explanatory.

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

#73
post #59
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

This seems to be a copy (no idea how exact the copy is): https://archive.org/details/gov.in.is.10005.1994/page/n5

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

#74
post #27
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There should be a scihub for isos

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

Wouldn't numbers make them easier to search? Sci-hub searches using DOI too after all.

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

#75
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This seems to be a copy (no idea how exact the copy is): https://archive.org/details/gov.in.is.10005.1994/page/n5

That's ISO-10005, ISO-1000 is the specification of STEbus which was a CPU semi-agnostic version of STDbus (which was Z80 specific).

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

#76
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems to be a copy (no idea how exact the copy is): https://archive.org/details/gov.in.is.10005.1994/page/n5

That's ISO-10005, ISO-1000 is the specification of STEbus which was a CPU semi-agnostic version of STDbus (which was Z80 specific).

I first searched for it on Wikipedia here[1] and then searched for the title.

STEbus seems to be IEEE 1000 and ISO 10859, perhaps you got confused with the numbers?

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_1000

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

#77
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should it be free? What is your rationale?

Because standards are not products. They should enable things, not to be used for profit. Profiteering from that hinders progress. It should be quite self explanatory.

Many standards are simply guidelines or arbitrary rules. Someone just makes it up. For e.g. i++ has a specific meaning according to a language standard. Or the width of a door should be 36" inches. That is something someone just made up. You can make up a standard yourself. Other kinds of standards have years of work behind them, like engineering standards for bridges, or food safety standards. Someone has to pay the people to do the work. There is nothing inherently free or non-free about them.

The other important thing here is being able to read the standard gets you nowhere. You have to implement the standard, and an independent third party has to verify that you have implemented them. Someone has to pay for all this work. It would be nice if this was tax payer supported, but if the government isn't going to pay for it, maybe you would like to setup an international fund to contribute? I'm sure they would love to make them free of charge.

>They should enable things, not to be used for profit. Profiteering from that hinders progress. It should be quite self explanatory.

I want to pay the people who work on the standards. Profits help with that. Ergo, profits help progress. QED :)

BTW, ISO standards have been for-pay for years. Please explain specifically how it has hindered progress. Some data would be nice. The burden of proof is on you, given the decades of counter-factual evidence.

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

#78
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because standards are not products. They should enable things, not to be used for profit. Profiteering from that hinders progress. It should be quite self explanatory.

Many standards are simply guidelines or arbitrary rules. Someone just makes it up. For e.g. i++ has a specific meaning according to a language standard. Or the width of a door should be 36" inches. That is something someone just made up. You can make up a standard yourself. Other kinds of standards have years of work behind them, like engineering standards for bridges, or food safety standards. Someone has to pay the…

Someone already pays for the work of making standards. And it's not ISO.

Someone has to pay for the work for implementing them too, but not for accessing the standard itself. Lot's of things were not free, because of someone trying to sit in the middle, where they shouldn't have.

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

#79
Very few programmers care about standards and even downloading drafts of them - despite all these forum/mailing lists arguments "what/which code is standard"( a tiny vocal minority), their market is likely some sort of enterprise bureaucrats that must have the Official(TM) Standard(TM) printed in triplicate to bully local programmers into following it "up to legal code". If the standards were free, i guess they're going to be a bit more popular, however thats too late to change programmer culture[1] which evolved without them - so standards organizations don't have much of an incentive to make them public domain. [1] Compiler manuals are what people using as standard, and standards eventually adopt compiler features.

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

#80

Very few programmers care about standards and even downloading drafts of them - despite all these forum/mailing lists arguments "what/which code is standard"( a tiny vocal minority), their market is likely some sort of enterprise bureaucrats that must have the Official(TM) Standard(TM) printed in triplicate to bully local programmers into following it "up to legal code". If the standards were free, i guess they're go…

Programmers care a lot about standards; we just have more open standards like RFCs and W3C/WHATWG.
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