Comment by dawidpotocki | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dawidpotocki | Hacker News Reader

> ISO 32000-2 was also, however, the first and only core PDF specification published exclusively — and only for purchase — by ISO, inhibiting its use and adoption over the last five years.

Who would have thought that "international standards" that require payment don't work well? How many people are willing to spend a couple hundred CHFs to access the PDF specs? Also it seems insane to me that the PDF creator, Adobe, now has to pay ANSI to distribute their own spec for free.

For some reason you still need to "add to cart" the standards and they will ask you for your address and email. You don't need to provide real information for anything, not even email, they just redirect you to a page with download links.

Also the EULA is insane.

> You may install one copy of the Product on, and permit access to it by, a single computer owned, leased or otherwise controlled by you. In the event that computer becomes dysfunctional, such that you are unable to access the Product, you may transfer the Product to another computer, provided that the Product is removed from the computer from which it is transferred and the use of the Product on the replacement computer otherwise complies with the terms of this Agreement. Neither concurrent use on two or more computers nor use in a local area network or other network is permitted. You may print one copy of the Product for your personal use. You shall not merge, adapt, translate, modify, rent, lease, sell, sublicense, assign or otherwise transfer any of the Product, or remove any proprietary notice or label appearing on any of the Product. You may make one (1) copy the Product for backup purposes only.

They don't even allow you to use it on your 2 devices at the same time. Complete nonsense that I'm sure everyone will follow.

> Who would have thought that "international standards" that require payment don't work well?

Who says that they don't work well?

All of the manufactured goods that you own, and how they got transported (e.g., shipping containers, boats, fuel for boats, etc) are probably based a dozens of ISO (and ANSI, SAE, etc) standards that had to be paid for.

It's been the norm for about a century and helped build the modern world. See Engineering rules: global standard setting since 1880 by Yates and Murphy for a history. There are some good lectures by them online as well:

* https://www.hagley.org/research/history-hangout-0

Sure, but the current model is just ridiculous. 290 or so CHF* is probably less than the procurement bureaucratic overhead in a large corporation that bases an entire line of business on a given standard, yet is prohibitive for hobbyists and many open-source projects.

A more reasonable model these days would probably be a per-seat license for an entire segment of the ISO library. As it is, I don’t even know if a given standard would actually be useful to have for my work, companies need to decide which employee(s) to license a copy for etc…

* I’m surprised it’s not billed in special drawing rights.

I run a business that extracts data from PDFs, even I couldn’t justify paying 290 CHF to buy a copy of the standard

I found an error/omission in the PDF spec 20 years ago and it's still there despite my efforts to characterize and report it to the grand overlords of PDF. (There is no security implication, hence I am nobody.)

When Apple eventually changed their implementation to be consistent with Adobe's, I gave up all further attempts as a waste of time.

My errata document is available under a $5000/yr corporate subscription agreement to my personal standards and practices library. Sorry, I do not offer memberships to individuals.

They don’t work well for product development. I’ve worked in consumer and medical product development for 30+ years. I’ve worked as a consultant or contractor or directly for companies from startups to Fortune 50.

So many small companies or even teams at big companies don’t know about the standards that they should follow (ISO, ASME, UL etc) or if they do they don’t want to pay for them. Then there’s the complexity of tracking licenses and copies with electronic downloads, which I promise you no one does 100% right. There are third parties who will track this for companies but I’ve never managed to get anyone to use them.

It’s hard to even get everyone I’ve worked with to follow ASME Y14.5, which is the drawing and dimensioning standard for mechanical engineering (in the US).

Part of the challenge is that so many of these standards are broken up into 50 different parts that are purchased separately. Oh, you want to know how to dimension castings, that’s a separate document. Abbreviations to use on drawings, that’s separate. Drawing formats, that’s separate. Etc.

The result is that people collect old PDFs they “found” somewhere, and no one has a complete, up to date set of standards for any field. Even if someone at a company tries to get people to pay for standards, they maybe put them on a shared drive somewhere and they aren’t properly licensed for the team.

The results are that standards aren’t known or properly followed. Which is supposedly the purpose of standards orgs, but most of them use publications as a source of income, which defeats their purpose.

There are a few standards like USB, which are free to download. This should be universal.

If they were free then the readers of such standards wouldn't be the customers of the standards organizations but the product.

> They don’t work well for product development.

I've used the ISO standards to develop smart card software. Before that I'd mostly consulted IETF standards.

The IETF standards are carefully crafted, clearly written by someone with experience in developing the thing they are documenting. That's probably because it's IEFT policy to insist on working code before the standard is ratified. The approach seems to be making it possible to to develop an interoperable version with that existing code just from the published standard. Since that's inevitably what you are trying to do it's a joy to work with.

The ISO standards on the other hand come across as brain dump made to look organised by the addition of bullet points, numbered lists and a table of contents. They give no explanation on why they made the design decisions behind the standard, so you end up having to re-discover it all yourself. It takes forever.

Having to pay for the ISO standards just adds insult to injury. As I was developing something that was a one off (I later open sourced most of it), I could not justify the thousands ISO was demanding. Fortunately if you dig long and hard enough, you can find copies of most of it lying around on the web.

> standards that had to be paid for.

I am extremely skeptical that everyone who has ever designed a glass bottle cap has paid for the glass packaging neck thread specifications. I know I sure as shit didn't the last time I had to make one. Come at me, bottlecap cartel.

Sure, there is a collective cost to develop and maintain standards, but making sure that they can be openly accessed afterwards should be considered as part of this cost burden.

I really could care less if something is "the norm" when it's still obviously antithetical to it's purpose. Saying "the norm" is always, always, always a red flag phrase that something is being held very far away from a natural state of balance.

When nobody tells lawyers no, this is what happens. This protects nobody other than some lawyers feeling fuzzy that they "mitigated risks" for their customer.

What if they are not allowed to say no to lawyers?

Legal is a cost center, which means that they don't get to say no. Here is how that conversation goes:

Lawyer: You must include my unenforceable EULA.

Anyone-with-a-brain: lol, no. Your "contribution" to this project only serves to do the direct opposite of our stated intent... Actually, why are you involving yourself here - are you billing for this?

Lawyer scampering noises recede into the distance

I think what a lot of people don't understand is that a lawyers job is to provide advise, not to make decisions.

Poorly conceived advice apparently.

Only in the minds of HN engineers. Lawyers who tell their clients to do nothing rather than actually help try to figure out a path forward go out of business very quickly.

In-house counsel is a little different but again even at places like IBM the lawyers could not get away with blocking meaningful business

Specifically, lawyers advise their clients on how to avoid liability.

The minimum liability comes from doing nothing, so the default advice is "Don't."

> The minimum liability comes from doing nothing

You must be working in a very unregulated industry if that’s true!

It still follows:

"How do I not get sued for my new medical device?"

"Don't sell it to anybody."

As a recovering lawyer, all I will say is that, it is extremely rare for any lawyer to have the power to do anything directly themselves of their own initiative, which is even more true in business than in other areas of law (lawyers can railroad their immigration, criminal defense, family law, etc clients a bit more because these clients have even less clue what is the right thing to do).

More likely in your scenario is:

Lawyer: You must include this EULA that this person/board/committee demands, and will fire both of us if you don't, because they asked me how to cover their asses in case of XYZ.

Anyone-with-a-brain: okay.

Lawyers themselves are certainly powerful, but they only really derive power from people with real power; states, boards of directors, judges, etc.

In a room sit three great men. A CEO, a lawyer, and an investor paying for both.

As a person who as been described as an "activist investor" by several angry businessmen, I've never seen a shareholder or board member demand anything like that. The only thing that I can think of that would loosely fit your hypothetical scenario would involve a non-human shareholder like a hedge fund making the demand, at the behest of their lawyers. I suppose another potential loose fit would be a fresh business school grad whining about the absence of a "moat" - and this sort of thing being the best that legal could offer in response. In either case both legal and management is to blame: legal for the bad council and management for not pushing back against something so stupid.

this an old school organization, they don't really have any incentives to be user friendly. they manage a lot of standards, it's a stable gig, they are doing okay, so they did what usually old school organizations do, they got an EULA decade(s) ago and now it's just there and maybe gets updated from time to time. buf no one even questions the need for it.

maybe if more things move online, if they face some serious competition, then they might start thinking about these as potential UX issues

Yep, it's a giant scam...

Same for (a lot of) science..

You pay taxes to build universities, you pay taxes for professors and other educators paychecks, you pay taxes for research grants, and all that money from you is than used to 'discover' something, but you need to pay some private company to actually read the article.

It's slowly changing, but still, a lot of science, for "poor people", is only available on pirate sites.

Not just for poor people - I've had to pirate papers that I've co-authored.

Damn. I would be ultra mad. Good for you for pirating.

This works for ISO standards in many areas.

In many environments there are requirements to be standards-compliant. Buying the standard is a prove of compliance. (Turn it around: "you didn't even obtain the standard! How could your product be compliant?")

This is of course mostly relevant for engineering. Less so in IT, but even IT standards compliance is sometimes part of government contracts. At least for language compilers.

And yes, nobody will be able to verify the compliance, but commercial vendors document how well they comply to the standard and that limits the liability.

The specifications for the electronic driving license - recently agreed to by the EU as one of their core standards - is only available as (a number of) ISO specifications.

ISO 18013-5 and co.

ISO C and ISO C++ also technically cost money.

This is true, but that's not good either. Thankfully finding a final draft isn't hard for these, but we shouldn't have to do it in the first place.

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