@uint8_t What are the incentives?

@uint8_t I was pretty shocked the first time I heard of the idea of following a standard that isn’t freely available. (It was ISO19115, a standard for geospatial metadata. No surprises that it has terrible tooling)

(CW added midthread) pay walls

@uint8_t @carlmalamud

@uint8_t https://archive.org/details/exploringinterne00mala/mode/2up ... I also bought a paper copy, because Carl still needs to eat.

@uint8_t Yes

@uint8_t Story of my life. I am sick and tired of ISO making so much money for mere documents that they often don't even do ANY work on.
This whole thing of having to pay a fortune for standards documents is what hinders innovation

@uint8_t In March 2024, the was a ruling by the European Court of Justice, which basically said that all standards that are mandatory for products must be free of charge.

I just looked up what's the current state of this:

There is now an official web site where you can request free access to european standards, and access those that were sucessfully requested by others: https://ec.europa.eu/transparency/documents-request/home

It explicitly says that everyone may use it, not just people in the EU.

(See caveats in replies!)

@uint8_t @neil are you suggesting that that becomes a standard?

@uint8_t you can hardly claim it's a standard and then keep it secret, and charging thousands of pounds to read it is pretty close to that.

@uint8_t agreed. This is one reason the Gov UK open Standards Principles https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/open-standards-principles/open-standards-principles states open standards must be "publicly available and free to use".

@uint8_t

*Especially* ISO 8601.

There are just too many incompatible half-arsed partial implementations written by people who haven't read the standard because they couldn't be arsed to try to drive their employer's purchase order system which they've otherwise never had any need to touch ...

@uint8_t what are we talking abt ?

@uint8_t @neil Ideally…

https://www.diy.com/bathroom/toilets.cat?Brand=Ideal+Standard

@uint8_t
Though that also means that creating and maintaining standards needs to be funded by government, industry consortiums, or NGOs. Doing all that work ain't free.