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by nonrandomstring
846 days ago
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> 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. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_technical_standard_org... |
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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).
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accellera