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Comment by zoeysmithe | Hacker News Reader

Why not? Its not an open standard. This is the rent-seeking behavior you get under for-profit capitalist implementations. This is why we push so hard for open standards.

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Uh, the HDMI forum is non-profit

Profit/non-profit isn't a big difference. Many non-profits are essentially businesses in practice (money spent/managed, the non-profit just a conduit to the for-profit companies that defacto own it), but just don't issue stock. A non-profit can act like this, and DOES. Non-profits exist in a capitalist context and inherit those norms. Again, this is why we aim for open standards.

Also a non-profit is just that, its not a charity. A charity is an entirely other classification and even those are regularly used and abused like this.

There is more than stock required to be non-profit. I suspect technically a non-profit could issue stock, though it is probably not something any would ever try.

Non-profit is a business arrangement where making money isn't the goal. There are many different versions of one though: many local clubs are a non-profit and they exist only for the benefit of their members.

Then why do they have all this?

That's meaningless, because they delegated licensing to HDMI® Licensing Administrator, Inc. And even if they are somehow a nonprofit: you are also not making any profit when all the money you retrieve via licensing fees is used to pay the royalties of the various patent holders.

Nobody cares if the mailing list where they discuss the upcoming specs is managed by a non-profit, the broader HDMI ecosystem is still a massive money grab.

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