Graham Sutherland / Polynomialpaywalled standards need to fuck off straight into the sea. truly one of the worst types of rent-seeking.
Gary Parker 
@gsuberland it’s not a standard if you have to pay to see it 🤷♂️
datenwolf@WiteWulf @gsuberland ISO would like to have a word.
*sigh*
doboprobodyne@datenwolf @WiteWulf @gsuberland
Obviously I'd never advocate anything naughty on social media, but is there a sci-hub homologue for standards?
blinken@gsuberland @doboprobodyne @datenwolf @WiteWulf I assume because a) they tag the PDF with your company name and I guess you could remove it but it's like 200 pages and b) if you're working for a client, they're paying the bill anyway and c) your professional indemnity insurance certainly isn't going to cover you if your Blockchain powered AI solar inverter explodes and you used a pirated standard, so there's not much demand I guess
@blinken @doboprobodyne @datenwolf @WiteWulf removing the tags is pretty easy, but yeah, I think a lot of it is just lack of motivation to upload them from the types of people who have access to them.
@blinken @doboprobodyne @datenwolf @WiteWulf there is demand though, especially for standards involved in public infrastructure.
@gsuberland @blinken @datenwolf @WiteWulf
Interesting! Very good points. Yes, as a lay-person, I tentatively held the view that after the Grenfell Tower fire, there might be some sort of interest in open standards. 🤷 I realise though that lay-people usually don't have a good grip on complex systems failures.
groff@doboprobodyne @gsuberland @blinken @datenwolf @WiteWulf
Not relevant for BSI, and not free, but Latvia has (had?) some of the lowest costs for EN, ISO, IEC standards.
https://www.lvs.lv/en/products/index
@geoffl @gsuberland @blinken @datenwolf @WiteWulf
Bloody good Intel, much obliged!
#openStandards #standards #teamwork #leadership #systems #safety
@blinken @gsuberland @datenwolf @WiteWulf
That's a very good point. Any entity that indemnifies the standard authority (and that might the standard authority itself, forking out money for lawyers) might need paying. If I lived in a country where I trusted the House of Lords to work constructively to design a civic and legislative framework to support standards setting authorities who published open standards, I might have hope
Klastrowy Bebok@datenwolf @WiteWulf @gsuberland ISO standards are awful, if i've been author of some ISO standard, I'd say it costs $100500 so no one will ever read it
halcy 
@gsuberland „you must use this tool for certification“ „okay can I have it?“ „no lol pay us for a dongle“
@gsuberland and lest you even think about making an alternative, of course we patented everything
@halcy one that I always feel pretty ambivalent about is the Harding Flash Pattern Analyser for photosensitive epilepsy risk mitigation in broadcast media. the requirements are open and fairly simple, but to actually check your media you have to buy or rent this stupidly expensive box made by one company who owns the patents. someone made a freeware tool that can risk-check your video files but it's less rigorous and it isn't considered sufficiently rigorous for actual broadcast.
@halcy and like, on the one hand the main people who get shafted by this are advertisers, who I don't give a fuck about. but on the other hand it feels shit to have a disability-accommodating tool be stuck behind a fairly hefty paywall.
aliceif she was teto@gsuberland and this is why we need to get rid of C and C++
maswan@gsuberland
This is the main reason why iso 8601 is not my favourite date standard anymore. RFC 3339 is my new best friend.
This is the main reason why iso 8601 is not my favourite date standard anymore. RFC 3339 is my new best friend.
@gsuberland for those that must, the Estonian standardisation organisation (evs.ee) provides the most reasonable pricing. What you then do with the DRM on the PDF is up to you.
Why people pay full price to BSI I have no idea, but they are literally printing money [standards]
@gsuberland also, why significant price discrepancies exist between countries when standards are literally... standardised internationally utterly baffles me
23n27@blinken @gsuberland They also have a very cheap "browse this standard online for X hours" feature for certain standards.
This works through an embedded pdf.js viewer on the website and a highly sophisticated encryption scheme that would prevent anyone from simply downloading the PDF file
@blinken @gsuberland Because of that, there are also no watermarks (visible or otherwise) in those files, because nobody can download them anyway.
@23n27 @gsuberland I see. That's very forward thinking of them
@blinken @gsuberland The reason why I like this of course is because having watermarks plastered across the whole page makes it hard for me to focus on the actual contents
@23n27 @gsuberland accessibility is very important, and good on the Estonian Centre for Standardisation and Accreditation for embracing it
John "Dobbymoodge" Lamb@gsuberland but if the NFPA NEC was free, libraries would see far less foot traffic. It's a good thing!
(It's a bad thing actually)
(Libraries are good of course)
baloo@gsuberland There is an even more insidious behavior: Even after you got a copy of it, you may not quote from the spec in your software implementation because of copyright issues.
That makes the code real easy to maintain!
(IEEE)
DJ🌞
@gsuberland which is why we all have a small "backup copy" of a subset of them. ;-) anything in particular you're looking for?
Joel Michael@gsuberland SAI Global especially can get truly absolutely always and forever fucked.
Sam@gsuberland I completely agree...but, somebody's to pay for them. Standards require expertise and stakeholders to devote time, they need drafting and editing and change control. And every couple of years you need everyone back in the room just to check if the standard is still applicable or needs updates. Then it needs to published, so severs and bandwidth security.
It's not a huge burden but some needs to do the work and we need to figure out how to pay them. Save apples to academic publication.
Charities do all of that with and more with no cost to the end user.