Comment by nick238
8 months ago
Standards are nice, but the large standards organizations like ISO annoyingly charge a bit to view them. I suppose this is because some businesses/industries require "real" standards by those orgs rather than the IETF or other dirty open-source hippie collectives.
They claim it’s to provide access and funding to undeveloped parts of the world.
Nice one
:-)
"Standard" and "costs money" feel at odds with each other. If you want something to become standard, as in the standard/most common way of doing something, it has to be abundantly accessible so that it can be widely implemented.
It's a double edged sword. Actually creating a good standard that people want to use through an open process that aims to be unbiased takes a non-trivial amount of time and hence costs a not insubstantial amount of money. Different standards organisations have chosen different approaches to solving that problem, and although I completely agree and freely available standards are my preferred approach, it is also very clear that ISO standards are well respected and widely used despite the need to pay to view them in some cases.
Some kind of funding model where large corporations can pay to have a standard written would be ideal. Even then it seems a bit odd. Web APIs don't seem to have this problem. Just have the big corps donate some engineers instead. I don't know, I guess nothing is perfect.
Most standards are low priced enough that they are sold at a loss. If you would prefer to donate to ISO (or the IEEE for another example) instead, that would help allay the cost of writing a standard.
My understanding it is quite often government/country contexts where (because ISO is recognised in various international treaties) it is easier to get approval to use an ISO standard than it is to use an OpenID Foundation standard. So getting OpenID Connect published with an ISO number just makes adoption easier for some projects.
OpenID Connect does of course remain free view/use, but now people in the above situation have an easier option available to them.