General > General Technical Chat
Harmonised technical standards to be publicly available in EU
Nominal Animal:
--- Quote from: 5U4GB on March 06, 2024, 09:59:18 am ---This is why there's a vast informal exchange of draft standards conveniently leaked from standards committees. Even the standards committee members, the people whose unpaid labour created the standard, often don't have access to the final thing.
And by "draft" I don't mean version 0.01 but pretty much the final version just with a few formatting changes not yet done. I have way, waaay more draft standards than actual ones, for all of the reasons you give above. It's funny doing work for some mega-corporation and noticing that they're all working from printouts of drafts as well, this standardised stupidity affects everyone not just the less financially able.
--- End quote ---
My favourite examples of these are the ISO 9899, aka C language, standards. 200€+ from ISO, but fortunately the final drafts (C23 - N3096, C17 - N2176, C11 - N1570, C99 - N1256) have been published by the committee at the Open Standards web site (which itself is sponsored by the Technical University of Denmark, DTU).
Of course, the EU harmonization thing does not affect such standards, unless they are referenced as part of EU law. So for the C standards, nothing will change. But kudos and high respect for the committee making key drafts publicly accessible.
I am a proponent for free and open standards, because I consider them essential for a technological society and fairness in competition, and thus worth taxpayers support.
What I would prefer to avoid is support an administration-heavy organization where the administrators get paid better than those who actually develop the standards...
Someone:
--- Quote from: rogerggbr on March 06, 2024, 03:10:52 pm ---I have said this before but if you need to review or learn about a particular standard go to your local university library where they likely have unlimited access.
--- End quote ---
Not so anymore, that loophole has been closed over here (DRM on the documents which requires validation of your identity to even view the "not for actual use" standards).
zilp:
--- Quote from: coppice on March 06, 2024, 11:25:06 am ---There might be a reasonable way of replacing copyright control with something like that, but one way or another you need to be able to trust the documents you are trying to comply with are genuine.
--- End quote ---
Erm ... that's just completely backwards!?
Currently, they are under copyright control and not available for free from a trusted source, which is why there is an incentive to use copies from questionable sources instead.
If they have to be available for free from a trusted source, that removes the incentive to use copies from questionable sources as you can always refer to the trusted source without overhead or other drawbacks.
If untrusted sources offer copies, that is only a problem if there is some other advantage to using those sources, not if you can trivially get a trusted copy.
5U4GB:
--- Quote from: NiHaoMike on March 06, 2024, 02:48:51 pm ---Cryptographically sign the documents. It's a long solved problem.
--- End quote ---
It's a solution to a problem that most likely doesn't exist.
Luckily we've got a large-scale, decades-old real-world counterexample to the ISO model. It's the IETF model. IETF standards have been freely available to anyone and everyone for decades, and are posted and re-posted... well, let's take a security-critical standard that a good chunk of the Internet relies on and that you're using right now to read this, RFC 5246. Google gives 182,000 hits for that, of which some admittedly will be references, but lets say there's at least tens of thousands of copies of that floating around, including in .ru, .cn, and for some reason I'm not getting anything for .kp but I bet there's copies there too. They're plain text files that anyone with the most basic tools can modify as much as they want.
As far as anyone knows, there have been approximately, oh, zero cases of anyone posting maliciously modified copies of it.
The nonsense about "we need to keep control to prevent this imaginary threat from materialising" is nothing more than ISO (and similar) propaganda to justify their charging outrageous amounts of money for what other standards bodies provide at no cost. Unfortunately like other types of propaganda they've been shouting it for so long that some people now appear to believe it.
An update, just had a look at a copy on a random Russian site, here, since there was a mention of "would you trust something from some site in Russia". This isn't the English original but a complete translation into Russian (try doing that with a paywalled standard), and seems to be the same as the English original. So with freely-available standards you definitely can now download it from a random site in Russia, and it's now translated into Russian, and the world hasn't ended because of it.
5U4GB:
--- Quote from: Zero999 on March 06, 2024, 06:30:48 pm ---Standards being behind a paywall is more of a problem because people are incentivised to obtain pirate copies, which might be, incomplete, outdated and have the dates changed to appear to be up to date.
--- End quote ---
There are at least two standards I work with frequently where many if not all of the implementations are based on the specs given in informally-circulated drafts rather than the final standard. In one case it took something like 20 years to get most things aligned to the final standard, in the other I think everyone just uses the draft form because everything else out there also uses it.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page
Go to full version