> proprietary formats and specifications such as ... DisplayPort
DisplayPort is not proprietary; it is a VESA standard.
> Lightning
If you owned any iPhone between 2012 and the present, you had to use Lightning, without choice. And for some inexplicable reason, Americans love iPhones.
People keep iphones for a long time. My unfair internal impression is that android phones still have micro-usb and allow any app to change your lockscreen to porn ads without identifying _which_ app made the change, because when I switched to iOS that was true, and I’ve only had two iphones so it can’t have been that long. (In reality it’s been eight years)
8 years is a long time in tech. Type-C ports are now commonplace in the Android world. The modern Android ecosystem is no longer the chaotic mess we saw during the Android 2.x era -- its permission system is a lot more complete now, and many features are locked down by default unless you explicit grant the applications permissions to use them.
> Aren't we able to create and use open standards?
In theory, sure. In practice you'll have to construct a financially sustainable organization that is able to motivate all interested parties to chip in and is also able to certify the implementation and at the same time also doesn't fall victim to internal corruption (e.g. high C-level compensation making it unsustainable). I think there are few-to-no precedents for that in the open source space in general, and even less when it comes to standards body organizations for maintaining a standard at that level of complexity.
In most domains proprietary specifications form the backbone of everything. A lot of governments refer to ISO standards, which by default are not open access.
> In practice you'll have to construct a financially sustainable
organization
Here's a list of just the best known ones [0]. There are literally
hundreds of thousands of open standards for everything from
communications to mechanical engineering, to packaging to chemical
formulas....
They make the world go round.
No piece of technology you use today, especially the Internet would
function without open standards and standards bodies.
For some reason bits of the digital tech industry, in particular media
and entertainments, have a parochial disconnection with the rest of
reality and forget that they stand on the shoulders of giants and
operate with the assent of everyone else in the world giving them the
standards space within which to work.
There is next to nothing "open" (if we go with "open" = "open access") about most of these organizations.
As a fun experiment, I went through the first 10 entries of the Wikipedia list. Only one of them[0] produces _open_ standards, which they have available for free download. For the rest of them the "standards" link on their website either directs to a webstore to purchase individual standards or to a membership signup.
I very much recognize that the world we live in is driven by standards. But while those standards drive the world forward, I think it's also important for industries (and governments) to recognize that the way their standards bodies operate in a way that's almost fundamentally incompatible with the forces that drive innovation in the software world (that they often proclaim that they also want in their industry).
Building a standards body as you point out isn't difficult and has been done many times over. What's difficult is building an _open_ standards body, which as of today looks like a mostly unsolved problem (same as open source funding).
You're right it's scandalous that "open" standards touted for public
safety and interoperability are sold for a fortune, excluding any
small business, curious individual or inventor.
That's congruent with the problem of parasitic publishers like
Elsevier who gouge publicly funded science and hold the world's papers
to ransom.
Practically, theremedy is the same; there's nothing in the above list
I can't find with a little effort via bit-torrents and Tor hidden
services. It's a small inconvenience to do the legwork and then clean
any PDF files for potenial malware.
There’s plenty of examples of successful open standards out there. The real issue is that, when it comes to video, there’s a lot of money in closed solutions because of “piracy”.
The moment you want to control what people watch and how they watch it, you lose any hope of having an open standard.
> In practice you'll have to construct a financially sustainable organization that is able to motivate all interested parties
Translation by obsolete sandwich-fed LLM:
In practice, zealously litigious organisations will assemble corporate lawyers in a room to compute profits and to define access constraints for consumers.
> In most domains proprietary specifications form the backbone of everything. A lot of governments refer to ISO standards, which by default are not open access.
Standards documents being behind a paywall is not at all the same thing as something being proprietary or needing to be licensed. ISO charges for standards documents to pay their administrative costs, you can implement those standards without paying any extra money. And if you happen to have an alternative way of implementing the standard without reading its document, that is fine too. If you implement JPEG XL by studying its open source reference implementation, that is A-OK.
Something being behind a paywall and copyright being used to prevent its redistribution is one of the textbook definitions of "proprietary".
In almost all cases of standards you can implement those standards without reading the document, from an IP standpoint. From a practical standpoint it is often just not feasible to reverse-engineer everything without the original documentation, or worth it if you can't slap the trademarked name of the technology on it.
It may be possible that AMD could even implement an open source driver stack for HDMI and be legally in the clear. What they fear is more souring the relationship and losing access, so they don't risk it when they were told not to do that.
meaning that in practice we would have to fundamentally tweak how capitalism (maybe?) works somehow
in the mean time keep paying taxes, rent, subscription, and utility bills.
i'm not even sure it's capitalism that needs to get modified? maybe it's something about how private/public property works that is cleary off the mark and needs updates?
I'd argue that in the internet specifically, open sourced implementations of the protocols are the backbone of everything not closed proprietary specs; aren't most internet specifications open?
In the purest of the pure internet, sure (depending on what level of the stack you look at). There you of course have other problems(?) like the fact that most browser-related standards are essentially steered by Google (via its dominance in browser market share). From the parts of the W3C that I've observed, I'd also not characterize them as a functioning standards body (I'm not sure they've published anything meaningful in the last decade).
But in many spaces where you interact with the "real world" you very quickly make contact with proprietary ISO standards (e.g. CAD, architecture). I'd argue that this is one of the big contributing factors to why there isn't more open source penetration in CAD, as central standards like STEP[2] would require contributors to purchase a number of ISO standards.
There are also some spaces where proprietary standards exist (usually when open implementations precede the standardized ones) like SQL[0], but the proprietary nature is ignored, as most people don't need their SQL implementations certified. AMD can't do that as they need to keep a friendly relation with the HDMI Forum for official certification.
There are also some ISO standards (associated with JTC1) that are open access[1], which seems like a decent model. I'm not sure who usually foots the bill for the whole standardization process here though.
It sounds like you're not aware of the reason. I personally believe that the reson is that there are many entities pushing against open standards since they would make copying easier and DRM harder.
This is correct. That's also why there is an ongoing trend to push users into walled gardens and onto hardware they do not control. Or as Cory Doctorow calls it the "war on general-purpose computing"
It's a battle for the control of the device. The ideal setup for the big corpos is that we do not own our devices, but we rent them, and they can then charge arbitrarily for different uses of them. This was what AT&T did with phones back in the day.
To expand on that, AT&T had a regulated monopoly. You were not allowed to attach non AT&T devices to their network, and they had the only network (and no one else could set one up by law). You did not own a phone, but leased it on a monthly basis.
When the telephone answering machine was invented (not by AT&T) you could not legally attach it.
The plus of this arrangement was that AT&T made devices that would last for decades, all areas of the country got service (regardless of wealth or population density or politics), and costs were not surprising. The minus of this arrangement was that innovation was stifled and some costs were artificially high. It became a competitive disadvantage that was holding our country back from innovation. There is a correlated timeframe between the breakup of AT&T and the massive expansion of the computer industry.
Costs were mind boggling and surprising. I got in huge trouble when I was in elementary school because I called my best friend who lived 1 mile away. It could cost more to call someone who lived in a different LATA (in my case, the other LATA was one mile away) than it did to call a different time zone. As I recall a call 1 mile away was billed at 23¢ per minute and a call to Portland, Oregon, three time zones away was 12¢ per minute (and this was in 1977 money, which where one dollar was worth six hamburgers). Another: the cost to rent a handset was $3 per month. By 1988 (and $1 was worth four hamburgers), you could buy a touch tone phone for $3 at Target.
> Aren't we able to create and use open standards?
You can, but you need monitor/graphics chip companies to use it. These are mostly the members/creators of the HDMI standard, they are also probably the best able to create a standard that others will use:
DisplayPort is not proprietary; it is a VESA standard.
> Lightning
If you owned any iPhone between 2012 and the present, you had to use Lightning, without choice. And for some inexplicable reason, Americans love iPhones.