What's the difference? What you described is capitalism.
If we lived in an economic system that didn't pay those organizations, they simply wouldn't exist.
Nitpick: if we lived in an economic system with universal basic income it's not unlikely people would decide to work on standards anyway.
> People aren't going to do that work for free.
Counterexample: all open source software.
Reality example: Open source only exists because people earn a living doing something else. It’s cost is very far from zero. In fact, if we accounted for it I would bet FOSS is, as a category, the most expensive software on the planet.
Nothing is free. A sad yet necessary truth that must be understood.
Do also note that most people spending countless hours on standards work on them either on their own time, or more usually, their affiliated organisation time (university, company...). Standard bodies rarely pay for actual standard development.
They also do nothing. Or go on vacations. There's a very small group of people (on a percentage basis) who develop enough drive and passion to work on FOSS at the level of domain expertise and dedication necessary to get anywhere.
It is important to make a distinction between developers who devote a non-trivial amount of time to FOSS and those who might scratch an itch once or twice in a codebase, never to be heard from again. While all contributions are valuable, GitHub is full of stagnating projects where occasional contributions from random developers simply isn't enough to keep them going.
Look at real active projects and you'll discover that the number of dedicated developers devoting the kind of time and effort necessary to sustain and drive the project forward can often be counted with one or two hands. That is evidence enough of what I am saying.
Why?
Well, there are millions of qualified software developers around the world who cover every domain in software development. I think we can agree that most of them have their basic needs covered. And yet, you don't see millions of developers flocking to work on FOSS.
Why is that?
Because the scenario you paint, for the most part, does not align with reality at scale.
The number of people who, as you say, "work on stuff that they care about personally regardless of how much or how little it earns them" is very, very small, a rounding error. You can't get very far on a FOSS project --particularly if measured across years-- without a very small core group that does all al heavy lifting.
BTW, the fact that FOSS can thrive with just a handful of developers driving a project and little random contributions from others here and there is fantastic. The ecosystem work very well and there's plenty of evidence to show this to be true.
My only point is that we should not pretend that millions of people will flock to FOSS if their basic needs are met. This sounds like one of those universal basic income arguments. And it simply isn't true. People don't function that way. If their basic needs are met, the last thing most people would do is sit in front of a computer for ten hours a day to write code for free.
You seem to be debating some other claim (about how FOSS can be maintained well) than people wanting to do things they care about when they are "settled". What I meant there is that they don't have to do their day jobs, which most of those millions you mention have to.
I have my own thoughts on FOSS (most of it is "finished" in that it served a purpose and there is no need for maintenance, even if it's imperfect and buggy), but we are not at a state where there are large groups of people who have the means not to care about regular income at all to know what they'd do.
FWIW, in the worst of times, it was the aristrocacy that pushed science and arts forward, because they were the only ones who had the means to do it: it wasn't as fast paced as today, bit it didn't stop either. We've since "democraticised" science and arts (gamifying it a bit) by also making jobs out of it and increasing access to education.
Sure, we don't need everyone to care about everything, but there will always be a critical mass of people caring about critical stuff.
In not-capitalism, there's a possibility this might not be true. Open source developers MIGHT NOT need to earn a living doing something else.
That's all well and fine. Except this is a fantasy. It has not existed ever in human history, does not exist today and the laws of physics say it cannot exist in the future.
If we limit the discussion to reality, well, FOSS isn't even close to free. Before a person can devote effort to working on FOSS, they have to sustain themselves.
Look, there's nothing whatsoever wrong with this reality. FOSS has gone incredibly far and deep under this model. There's nothing wrong with recognizing that FOSS exists due to what one might call charity. It's people working at whatever they do who then donate some of their free time to whatever they care about in the FOSS domain. And that's fantastic. Let's not pretend it's free though. It costs every single contributor a non trivial amount of time to participate in the effort. And that isn't free for anyone on this planet.
What I am saying is that this isn't a bad thing, yet it is a reality that should not be swept under the rug.
FALSE, FALSE and FALSE.
>there's a possibility this might not be true
Zero, zilch, nada. People will not do grunt work for free because it's not fun.
>Will people create wealth if they can’t get paid for it? Only if it’s fun. People will write operating systems for free. But they won’t install them, or take support calls, or train customers to use them. And at least 90% of the work that even the highest tech companies do is of this second, unedifying kind.
I think there are very few people on the planet, if any, who would consider writing a standards document for some medical equipment to be fun enough to do free of cost. In fact I doubt it's even possible to make standards documents for physical things like medical equipment free of cost. It's an entirely different ball game from software standards.
Weird comment to make on the literal internet, where all the standards (Whether IETF, W3C, or WHATWG) are freely available.
What is weird about giving a counter-example?
> IETF and those standards organizations are funded by other people BTW, they don't consist entirely of individuals putting their own money in.
Sure, nobody is claiming that no money is involved at all. The point is: they do not charge for standards, we, the people who read standards, do not fund them. And yet they exist. Not only do they exist, but they maintain some of the most widely implemented standards in the world. Clearly this proves it is possible to not charge for standards and still have standards.
Nope.
Capitalism: An economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit.
Maybe the problem is they are not teaching shit in our schools. No, actually, I am wrong. They are teaching shit. Literally.
Funny guy. Comedian in training?
Here, let me help you:
https://www.rd.com/article/what-does-literally-mean/
It's a good read, you will, literally learn something that might literally make your head explode.
:)
I could just as easily claim that “capitalism” has some separate colloquial definition.
What is funny how you were so interested in dictionary definitions before. You’re a pedant when it serves you and when it doesn’t, you’re not. Typical HN. Hope you smug sense of self satisfaction is compensating for whatever you’re missing :)
Thanks for the insult and personal attack. Always a sign of someone with whom one can have enlightened conversations.
> Most standards organizations have SOME way of making money, because we live in capitalism.
which could be shortened as:
> Most things that keep existing have SOME way of making money, because we live in capitalism.
And you rebuttal that it cost money to do anything is a confirmation that it is due to capitalism. I would argue that it is the definition of capitalism.
I do not mean this to be a value judgment.
Sorry my friend. It isn't. It costs money to do anything on this planet, even if it isn't what most would understand to be currency. Barter is also a form of currency.
Altruism aside, nobody is going to give someone a dozen eggs without getting something in return. And that something has to be worth at least what it took to get the 12 eggs. Because, well, doing something at a loss is not sustainable. Eventually you hit zero.
And, of course, you have to protect yourself from unknowns --five egg-laying chickens are eaten by a wolf. Which means you need to get something more than what it takes to make those eggs or you will, again, hit zero when you can't sustain things because of various events.
At this point this isn't even profit. You are working for exactly what you put into making those eggs and a small insurance hedge because shit happens.
Now we get into capitalism: Your eggs are better than those someone else offers. You deliver. You have better packaging. If an egg arrives cracked, you replace it. You created a system to be able to package eggs safely with less work.
You recognize this delivers value. You determine you can charge more for your eggs than the raw cost of production. You also want to expand so you can service more people in town and maybe even neighboring towns.
You need money to expand...because the construction isn't going to be free. So, you tack on as much profit onto your price for a dozen eggs as the market is willing to pay and hope for the best. That last part is important. Someone else could come out with equivalent eggs and tack-on less profit. Unless you have a monopoly, you do not control profit, the market does.
And that, in a super-simple nutshell, is how capitalism happens.
Absolutely every person on the planet is a capitalist.
Why?
Everyone tries to earn more than the raw costs to exist. That's your profit. It allows you to save to get things you want, navigate tough times, support a family, go to school, etc.
In other words, capitalism is part of our very DNA. It isn't some weird evil thing that's been imposed on society.
We have family from the old USSR. You wouldn't believe the things they had to do to survive. Capitalists to the core...because the shit they lived in was just that, shit.
> Altruism aside ...
We need resources to keep existing and we need people to work to make resources, in almost every case people need other's work to survive.
The concept that these transactions can and should be conceptualized via their monetary value (rather than civic duty, status, noblesse oblige, etc.) is capitalism.
Feudal nobles needed food to eat the same as us, but they did not live in a capitalist society.
We could convert their military power, their family links to nearby nobles, and the willingness of their subjects to obey them to some kind of monetary value, but all of these things did not behave as capital.
> Everyone tries to earn more than the raw costs to exist. That's your profit. It allows you to save to get things you want, navigate tough times, support a family, go to school, etc.
This is scarcity not capitalism, if you only have subsistence level of resources you have 0 capital.
The main characteristic of a capitalist system if that resource ownership and production happen in a market.
for example Mexican avocado cartels compete in a globalized capitalist market, but the farmer they extort live in very different system.
---
I am not passing any kind of judgment on capitalism here, not saying whether we can/should move away from it, but there have been societies not built on capitalism.
No. Because it costs money to run these organizations. They are either funded by the government (which means taxes, which means us), membership fees or other activities. Last I checked everyone needs to feed themselves or their family. This "it's because it's capitalism" thing gets old pretty quickly.
What should be objectionable is precisely when organizations are government (taxes, us) funded and they sell us standards you are supposed to work and test against for, well, government-mandated certification requirements. So...we pay for their work through taxation...for them to sell us the products they create...and then we pay for the testing services against documents we cannot freely access even though we paid for their development. That's just messed-up.
This is where it gets complicated. If USA or European taxpayers fund the development of these standards, should others outside of those regions have to pay or contribute in any way? China is no-longer a poor agrarian society. And yet they benefit from work done in the EU and USA for decades at great cost to taxpayers.
Not sure what the answer to this is other than to point out these things are not simple. There's the "well, it benefits everyone" angle, which brings us back to "Why are these organizations charging for PDF's at all?".