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0 pointsnonrandomstring2y ago0 comments

> In practice you'll have to construct a financially sustainable organization

Here's a list of just the best known ones [0]. There are literally hundreds of thousands of open standards for everything from communications to mechanical engineering, to packaging to chemical formulas....

They make the world go round.

No piece of technology you use today, especially the Internet would function without open standards and standards bodies.

For some reason bits of the digital tech industry, in particular media and entertainments, have a parochial disconnection with the rest of reality and forget that they stand on the shoulders of giants and operate with the assent of everyone else in the world giving them the standards space within which to work.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_technical_standard_org...

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hobofan2y ago

There is next to nothing "open" (if we go with "open" = "open access") about most of these organizations.

As a fun experiment, I went through the first 10 entries of the Wikipedia list. Only one of them[0] produces _open_ standards, which they have available for free download. For the rest of them the "standards" link on their website either directs to a webstore to purchase individual standards or to a membership signup.

I very much recognize that the world we live in is driven by standards. But while those standards drive the world forward, I think it's also important for industries (and governments) to recognize that the way their standards bodies operate in a way that's almost fundamentally incompatible with the forces that drive innovation in the software world (that they often proclaim that they also want in their industry).

Building a standards body as you point out isn't difficult and has been done many times over. What's difficult is building an _open_ standards body, which as of today looks like a mostly unsolved problem (same as open source funding).

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accellera

nonrandomstringOP2y ago

You're right it's scandalous that "open" standards touted for public safety and interoperability are sold for a fortune, excluding any small business, curious individual or inventor.

That's congruent with the problem of parasitic publishers like Elsevier who gouge publicly funded science and hold the world's papers to ransom.

Practically, theremedy is the same; there's nothing in the above list I can't find with a little effort via bit-torrents and Tor hidden services. It's a small inconvenience to do the legwork and then clean any PDF files for potenial malware.

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