Re:“ISO obstructs adoption of standards by paywalling them”
by dragonwriter on Monday March 08, 2021 @03:05PM
(#26390783)
> Tim Sweeney correctly observes this, then continues to talk about "millions of hobbyist programmers". I do not believe that ISO targets, or even has any remote interest, in this market.
They probably don't. And, maybe that made sense decades ago when it was more true (though this has never been completely true) that serious software came out of big industry with up-front allocation of resources, whereas what any hobbyist programmers were working on was something else entirely. Today, much serious software is built by informal networks of developers who don't necessarily share an organizational affiliation even if some of them have institutional sponsors. And a lot of it evolves fluidly, without mandated standards as institutional requirements, so if developers can't get a standard freely to assess it for fitness, they simply won't consider it at all. Thet’ll either ignore it entirely, or approximate the behavior of some other piece of software that implements (perhaps not faithfully) functionality from the standard relevant to the needs of the new project (maybe making alterations to suit the different use case, without reference to the inaccessible standard, which may have a solution for the new projects problem that the project used as a model didn't need.)
ISO/ANSI/etc. model of selling standards documents to fund the standards maintenance organization introduces friction for even “serious software” in that environment, whereas the models used by the IETF, ECMA, W3C, etc., that funded standards work without relying on selling standards docs does not.
Now, of course, there's an easy workaround; if you want technology to be used, and multiple standards organizations make standards in the field, don't submit it (at least not exclusively) to the paid-access organizations. But you've also got to get, e.g., governments onboard so that they don't adopt paid-access standards into law.
They probably don't. And, maybe that made sense decades ago when it was more true (though this has never been completely true) that serious software came out of big industry with up-front allocation of resources, whereas what any hobbyist programmers were working on was something else entirely. Today, much serious software is built by informal networks of developers who don't necessarily share an organizational affiliation even if some of them have institutional sponsors. And a lot of it evolves fluidly, without mandated standards as institutional requirements, so if developers can't get a standard freely to assess it for fitness, they simply won't consider it at all. Thet’ll either ignore it entirely, or approximate the behavior of some other piece of software that implements (perhaps not faithfully) functionality from the standard relevant to the needs of the new project (maybe making alterations to suit the different use case, without reference to the inaccessible standard, which may have a solution for the new projects problem that the project used as a model didn't need.)
ISO/ANSI/etc. model of selling standards documents to fund the standards maintenance organization introduces friction for even “serious software” in that environment, whereas the models used by the IETF, ECMA, W3C, etc., that funded standards work without relying on selling standards docs does not.
Now, of course, there's an easy workaround; if you want technology to be used, and multiple standards organizations make standards in the field, don't submit it (at least not exclusively) to the paid-access organizations. But you've also got to get, e.g., governments onboard so that they don't adopt paid-access standards into law.