NEC (electric) is $170: https://www.nfpa.org/product/nfpa-70-national-electrical-cod...
IPC (plumbing) is $130: https://webstore.ansi.org/standards/icc/iccipc2024
And there are many others.
(I will say the YC company https://up.codes/ makes these much more accessible, and deals with local variants to these regulations)
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.
Sharing the cost to make the standard makes it a better mix of getting good standards and having low costs for final users.
A great example of this is the GigE Vision/GenICam standards that are used by basically all machine vision cameras, which were accessible to non-licensees but not usefully implementable (these standards explicitly prohibited 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.
Is that legally enforceable? IANAL, but that feels dubious to me. Feels like there should be a way around that.
This is the kind of thing politicians in a reasonable world would make illegal and subject to sanctions.
Even a few thousand dollars isn't much of a barrier for a company that wants to build a product.
https://webstore.ansi.org/standards/iso/isoiec98992024?sourc...
Nobody does it. gcc/clang implement it from the "drafts", which are published online due to the need to discuss them prior to standardization.
But now it is all too late to debate and fix this.
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.
Unless the goal is not to create standards, but instead to control access to said standard.
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 actual spec 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.
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.
At my first corporate job the first thing I did was checkout and read all the MPEG standards.
But I agree, the whale we need to go after is IEEE.
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.
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.
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.
Adherence to a standard is not the goal, defining interoperability between existing systems is. And everyone participating is already a paying member of SMPTE.
In the organizations I know - including ISO - the money is basically exclusively spent on "overhead".
I assume most democracies have similar laws, it's a basic right to know what laws you should follow ...
I would assume that France, like many countries heavily rely on ISO standards, which in many cases cost some money. Or is it the case that those standards are not explicitly mandated, but are essentially only fulfillable by knowing the ISO standard?
https://www.francenormalisation.fr/les-acteurs-de-la-normali...
If there is only knowing the norm that makes you able to follow the law that refers it then it's a "obligatory norm" and must be readable without cost.
https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/loda/article_lc/LEGIARTI00004...
List of such norms in spreadhseet linked here:
https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/contenu/menu/autour-de-la-loi...
Success? Ca€€hing! (sound of cash register)
It's net-head vs. Bell-heads all over again, and one of the biggest reasons for the success of the IETF standards was the no-cost availability of all their standards.
This will only increase innovation.
There may be court cases in the future that determine what the boundaries on API reimplementation are that distinguish fair use from infringement. A future Supreme Court may well overturn Oracle v. Google. APIs are specific forms of unique expression, and the same functionality can be made available through different APIs. (See for example, OpenGL vs. Direct3D.) Typically these are the criteria used to determine what is eligible for copyright, and ruling APIs uncopyrightable absent a statutory carve-out exemption may well put the copyrightability of currently protected forms of expression in jeopardy.
But as things stand, the Oracle v. Google decision has only made the API-copyrightability decision more ambiguous, it has not settled the matter in favor of making APIs uncopyrightable.
LibGen?
>This move is part of a broader effort to modernize the organization's Standards development and publication processes. Recent initiatives include:
>Adopting GitHub-based workflows for version control
>Issue tracking and automation
>Transitioning to structured HTML-based authoring
>Implementing an integrated publishing pipeline that streamlines document creation, review, validation and release.
I am not entirely sure the Hosting on Github, Issue tracking and automation, and HTML-based authoring are all good thing. Although I would guess it is still better than what they had.
And on another note, can anyone pin point the significance of making this entirely Free? SMPTE doesn't hold any patents. And I don't believe their original standards were hard to access. Are there any significant impact of this announcement?
[1] https://www.smpte.org/setting-the-standards-free?hsCtaTracki...
It's critical for data encodings (codecs, metadata,) because without free standards developers will attempt to reverse engineer from sample files, resulting in poor interoperability and causing chaos for those implementers that actually do bother to acquire and read the spec.
There's some really neat ones all the way from film standards to digital cinema
And this should be mandatory.
