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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

POSIX is hardly much more open than ISO, it also has its issues, and contributing to OpenGroup is hardly like doing a pull request.

So is Khronos also a relic? After all if the standards are made available, the contributions are "you have to be this tall to play" kind of entry.

I do agree that ISO should improve itself to modern times, though.

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The Open Group hosts hosts a searchable, hyper-linked form of the specification.

Here is the 2024 update:

https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9799919799/

If you go to the Main Index there is a link to a Downloads page where you can get a tarball of this stuff in some shape or form for local use.

Vast difference between this and the paywalls put up by ISO and their member organizations, and their free PDFs that have only tables of contents.

Now try to contribute to OpenGroup.

You mean free pdfs like C and C++ drafts?

https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/n3220.pdf

https://isocpp.org/files/papers/N4860.pdf

Maybe like Ada,

http://ada-auth.org/standards/ada2y.html

Or Fortran,

https://j3-fortran.org/doc/year/23/23-007r1.pdf

Apparently there is a little more than a table of contents, when people actually know where to look.

It shouldn't be easy to contribute to POSIX. That shit needs some serious gatekeeping. It's not a side-project whose goal is self-actualization for all participants. The requirements get foisted on everyone and last decades.

I agree with you about the seriousness and heft of POSIX (and I definitely know your name from comp.lang.c[.moderated], so I respect your opinion); however, there is no arbitrary gate-keeping around POSIX. If anyone is willing to put in the time and effort, they're welcome to join. This couldn't be more different from other standards orgs where you can only join as a (voting, or observing) representative of an employer that pays an exorbitant yearly membership fee.

> Now try to contribute to OpenGroup.

Funnily enough, I had ended up contributing to POSIX without trying to. I just participated in mailing list discussions and in the public bug tracker (reporting issues, commenting on tickets etc), for which I only needed to register a no-strings-attached account -- the absolute minimum for participating in any bug tracker. Unexpectedly, I got named in the "Participants" section of the standard. My head is still spinning.

Here are some links for you:

- SUSv2: https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007908775/idx/index.ht...

- SUSv3, 2004 Edition: https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/000095399/nfindex.html

- SUSv4, 2024 Edition: https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9799919799/

You can find links to earlier editions of SUSv3 and SUSv4 here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_UNIX_Specification#Exte...

Austin CSRG landing page: https://www.opengroup.org/austin/

Join the group: https://www.opengroup.org/austin/lists.html

Bug tracker: https://austingroupbugs.net/view_all_bug_page.php

I don't know where the SUSv1 PDFs are, I have local copies; but in 2025, they're at best of historical interest.

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