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by tialaramex 29 days ago
> no ISO standard

I'm sure I could argue with you about the actual technical differences but this part in particular is very, very stupid.

JTC1/SC22 † shouldn't exist at all. A committee structure is a bad way to do this work, and the practice of having periodic meetings - exclusively in person for much of the time these existed - actually makes it less rather than more useful.

ISO mandates a bunch of rules and procedures which surely make some sense if you're agreeing on thread dimensions for oil pipelines but are completely inappropriate for this work and yet because they're ISO committees the WG14 and WG21 processes are captured.

I don't think it makes good sense to use an SDO for this work, but if you must have an SDO for some reason beyond ego then you could do a lot better than ISO. Check out TC39 for example.

† The C and C++ standards committees are respectively Working Groups 14 and 21 of the Sub-committee on Programming Languages, SC22, of the (First and only) Joint Technical Committee between ISO and the IEC. Yes it's committees all the way down. "This programming language standard could have been an email".

1 comments

It doesn't have to be ISO, but some organization which follows some official rules and not some entity dependent on industry donations.
LOL. You do know ISO/IEC 29500 exists right?

ISO agreed that despite there being an existing, popular, broadly supported and open XML document standard they should define Microsoft's proprietary alternative OOXML as an international "standard". They even held votes repeatedly until the voters gave the "correct" answer... no worry about "industry donations" there.

I remember the story, but it was considered outrageous for a reason.
I'm sure it would be considered "outrageous" when the same happens outside an SDO too.
Well, one could consider Mozilla's management of firefox to be outrageous, but then, Google pays, so what to expect?