It's net-head vs. Bell-heads all over again, and one of the biggest reasons for the success of the IETF standards was the no-cost availability of all their standards.
This will only increase innovation.
There may be court cases in the future that determine what the boundaries on API reimplementation are that distinguish fair use from infringement. A future Supreme Court may well overturn Oracle v. Google. APIs are specific forms of unique expression, and the same functionality can be made available through different APIs. (See for example, OpenGL vs. Direct3D.) Typically these are the criteria used to determine what is eligible for copyright, and ruling APIs uncopyrightable absent a statutory carve-out exemption may well put the copyrightability of currently protected forms of expression in jeopardy.
But as things stand, the Oracle v. Google decision has only made the API-copyrightability decision more ambiguous, it has not settled the matter in favor of making APIs uncopyrightable.
LibGen?
NEC (electric) is $170: https://www.nfpa.org/product/nfpa-70-national-electrical-cod...
IPC (plumbing) is $130: https://webstore.ansi.org/standards/icc/iccipc2024
And there are many others.
(I will say the YC company https://up.codes/ makes these much more accessible, and deals with local variants to these regulations)
This is essentially a protection racket. Ludicrous.
While AI models still hallucinate commonly, this might not be the best use of it.
The downsides of the occasional hallucinated answer for building standards seems like it could be pretty bad. Seems much worse than the upsides?
It's one thing to make the POP3 standard free; worst case your mail gets lost. It's another to make the standard for the electrical code free, so that people can incorrectly implement its quite complicated rules, and result in things like fires and electrocution.
I have never seen a YouTube video where anyone even mentioned the code unless they were a professional or engineer. Most people are not very smart. Making the code free isn't going to make them smarter. I'm the one guy on subreddits telling people not to modify random beams in their house unless they know how it ties into the rest of the structure to determine the structural impact. 99% of people reply that I'm over-reacting. That's how they act towards the code. Slap it real hard and if it seems solid it's good to go.
Same is true about anything from cooking to crocheting to brushing teeth. Documentation isn't written for those who know, but for those want to know, and those who know better and would rather not follow it tend to not read it in the first place. It's as true of ISO standards as it is of instruction manual to your induction stove, or electric toothbrush.
> That's part of why the apprentice period is so long.
I'm going to bet that technically, post-COVID, it's "$300 + few hours of videos and a quiz" long.
(At least that seems to be the case for basic electrical work over here, in Poland, according to the electrician who did lights in my apartment the other day.)
> I have never seen a YouTube video where anyone even mentioned the code unless they were a professional or engineer.
Perhaps because they have no access to it without spending unreasonable amounts of money on it, unless they were a professional or engineer? YouTube videos are bargain bin education. A random video you referred to costed less to make than getting a bootleg copy of the code would. Probably whole channel did.
> Most people are not very smart. Making the code free isn't going to make them smarter.
Nothing will help "most people". But the rest would benefit.
BTW. most contractors are in the "not very smart" group too, which is a possible reason why you won't get many answers from them - they're either unable to, or plain unwilling to entertain people asking "why".
> I'm the one guy on subreddits telling people not to modify random beams in their house unless they know how it ties into the rest of the structure to determine the structural impact. 99% of people reply that I'm over-reacting. That's how they act towards the code. Slap it real hard and if it seems solid it's good to go.
It's a separate subject, but thing is, they're probably right.
In my experience, the difference between a load-bearing wall and a regular one boils down, for most people, to the question of whether they need a hammer drill or will regular cordless drill suffice. The hole is happening either way. I used to be the guy worrying about it a lot, until I noticed that even contractors don't care. Unless I'm literally asking them to cut a new entryway through the load-bearing part, they don't even parse the question.
Was I right to worry? Are they wrong? Well, I presume no to both, or else apartment building collapse would be daily news. Then again, I can't tell for sure, because of people in power thinking "it's too complex for [laypeople] to understand" and gate-keeping standards and codes.
Someone has to pay for this. Making companies (and often, many of the individual members do this out of their own pocket) pay it all means worse standards, as some people stop going.
Sharing the cost to make the standard makes it a better mix of getting good standards and having low costs for final users.
A great example of this is the GigE Vision/GenICam standards that are used by basically all machine vision cameras, which were accessible to non-licensees but not usefully implementable (these standards explicitly prohibited their use in implementing any open source implementation of the standards). So essentially all they could be used for were (1) as a licensee producing closed-source software for their own cameras, or (2) you as customer trying to complain to your camera/software vendor that they failed to implement some part of the standard correctly.
Is that legally enforceable? IANAL, but that feels dubious to me. Feels like there should be a way around that.
This is the kind of thing politicians in a reasonable world would make illegal and subject to sanctions.
So then next question who should fund whole thing? Tax payers or the companies which is vast majority of users. Well self-funding organisation sounds really good for politicians. Move the costs to companies. Thus paid standards.
Even a few thousand dollars isn't much of a barrier for a company that wants to build a product.
What? You mean it's reasonable for a DIYer to cough up $300 just to find out what's the current standard for say, color coding wires on an AC outlet?
https://webstore.ansi.org/standards/iso/isoiec98992024?sourc...
Nobody does it. gcc/clang implement it from the "drafts", which are published online due to the need to discuss them prior to standardization.
Also, you can look at smaller European countries putting their national cover page on it, and selling it cheaper. It’s the same standard, in English.
The C standard is only a bit cheaper at the Lithuanian agency: https://eshop.lsd.lt/public#!/product/info/0a640332-9273-166...
Sometimes it‘s much cheaper: the Germans sell IEC 62443-4-2 for 400 Euros, the Estonians for 40 Euros:
https://www.dinmedia.de/de/norm/csa-iec-62443-4-2/331021994?...
This was reversed for the first standard, which ANSI published in 1989; ISO adopted it, with editorial changes, in 1990. The term "ANSI C" usually (not entirely correctly) refers to the 1989 standard. If you want to refer to a particular version, it's best to refer to "ISO C" and the date (1990, 1999, 2011, 2023).
The money you pay for a copy of the standard doesn't go to the people who do the work of writing it, who are either volunteers or paid by their employers.
But now it is all too late to debate and fix this.
On the other hand I served on a committee and wrote a technical report that costs 133 CHF and personally I'm a bit annoyed that (1) I can't send you a link to read it for free and (2) a friend of mine who worked for the US government and is the only person I ever met who knew how to do complex modelling in OWL couldn't contribute her writing to it because everything US government employees write is supposed to be public domain.
Unless the goal is not to create standards, but instead to control access to said standard.
Strictly, just because the standard costs money doesn't mean that the information within it is otherwise unavailable. The C++ spec is an amusing example of this: the actual spec costs $$$, but the final draft is freely available. I can't imagine they sell many copies. I know that back when I was employed to work on a C++ compiler I only had access to the draft.
If demonstrating conformance is important, I suspect that the cost of access to specifications is only going to be a small fraction of the cost of certification. And as I understand things, it's certification that's the target of charging for specifications.
At my first corporate job the first thing I did was checkout and read all the MPEG standards.
But I agree, the whale we need to go after is IEEE.
I wholeheartedly second this. I'm an individual member and a member of a specific IEEE society that sponsors a specific standard and I still have to pay for a copy. In contrast, the same standard has been adapted for specific industries and there are IEC, ITU and a SMPTE specs adopting it and those I can get for free. Doubly irritating because some of the most crucial standards like the 802 family are all paywalled. And it's not like it's warranted because if I need a standard I'm probably a vendor. Take high-speed Ethernet for example, there is such a proliferation of media types, lane counts, line encodings, FEC options and speed combinations that an engineer needs a reference from the source, and instead it's either third-party information or "stolen" PDFs.
It would be nice if, for example, USB did this so that I know a USB cable actually works with a specific standard before I buy it.
They don't gather industry experts in a conference room and whiteboard out a perfect design that everyone agrees on and then go off to build products.
What happens is that companies develop products and services, and at some point it becomes more useful for those products to inter operate and protocols/interfaces between them need to be agreed upon. Oftentimes it's the mutant bastard children of the existing approaches by multiple stakeholders, encumbered by patents and legacy.
Adherence to a standard is not the goal, defining interoperability between existing systems is. And everyone participating is already a paying member of SMPTE.
In the organizations I know - including ISO - the money is basically exclusively spent on "overhead".
I use the term similar to who it's used for non-profit. The orgs I'm involved with are almost exclusively not involved in the actual standards creation.
If the secretariats were to shut down tomorrow I'd say the actual work on the standards could continue without anyone noticing.
There is a reason that at least the EU is considering modernizing the system. https://single-market-economy.ec.europa.eu/consultations/pub...
ISO, CEN, CENELEC, ETSI are stuck very much in the past.
So yes. Overhead.
BSI Group, for example, paid 26.1% tax (25% corporation tax plus some other stuff) according to its 2025 financial statement.
In my direct experience, the people who write the standard texts get a room to sit in, power for laptops, a whiteboard, and tea/coffee and biscuits, a few days per year.
I assume most democracies have similar laws, it's a basic right to know what laws you should follow ...
I would assume that France, like many countries heavily rely on ISO standards, which in many cases cost some money. Or is it the case that those standards are not explicitly mandated, but are essentially only fulfillable by knowing the ISO standard?
https://www.francenormalisation.fr/les-acteurs-de-la-normali...
If there is only knowing the norm that makes you able to follow the law that refers it then it's a "obligatory norm" and must be readable without cost.
https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/loda/article_lc/LEGIARTI00004...
List of such norms in spreadhseet linked here:
https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/contenu/menu/autour-de-la-loi...
Success? Ca€€hing! (sound of cash register)
>This move is part of a broader effort to modernize the organization's Standards development and publication processes. Recent initiatives include:
>Adopting GitHub-based workflows for version control
>Issue tracking and automation
>Transitioning to structured HTML-based authoring
>Implementing an integrated publishing pipeline that streamlines document creation, review, validation and release.
I am not entirely sure the Hosting on Github, Issue tracking and automation, and HTML-based authoring are all good thing. Although I would guess it is still better than what they had.
And on another note, can anyone pin point the significance of making this entirely Free? SMPTE doesn't hold any patents. And I don't believe their original standards were hard to access. Are there any significant impact of this announcement?
[1] https://www.smpte.org/setting-the-standards-free?hsCtaTracki...
It's critical for data encodings (codecs, metadata,) because without free standards developers will attempt to reverse engineer from sample files, resulting in poor interoperability and causing chaos for those implementers that actually do bother to acquire and read the spec.
So yes, you can git clone the repo and get the HTML, but if you want all the other stuff (the "github based workflows") then you have to use github.
Except what would you want it for? The issues and wikis and "github based workflows" are for people working on a thing, not for people using that thing or depending on it.
SMPTE have chosen github because it has the other stuff to allow them to manage the committee work, handle the issues raised in committees, drafts, tagging different versions, dealing with the committee processes etc.
They could have chosen something like JIRA, so at least we've avoided that.
That's what they said in the post about it being open.
They've moved the internal email mailing lists and other workflow to github as well as using git for the version control of the source.
And this should be mandatory.
The SMPTE standards have been very important for cinematography and television, especially for professional applications.
Their importance has decreased since the transition to digital video, when many relevant standards have been issued by other organizations, but many SMPTE standards are still important, especially regarding the formats used for distributing digital movies for movie theaters.
They live in a ho-ho-hole
(Tiny hole)
That is usually empty
(Usually empty, tiny too)
They live by a code
(Dit dit dit dit)
That is usually SMPTE
Which stands for
Society of Motion Picture & Television Engineers
Then I scrolled to the bottom of the page and I did see it in the footer: SOCIETY OF MOTION PICTURE AND TELEVISION ENGINEERS
Today I learned
Source: I'm a card-carrying AES member.