Comment by thx67
4 hours ago
In the world they operated in when this started was in a big corporate environment, gatekeeping was a feature. Anyone who needed a standard could already get it for free through their companies records department.
At my first corporate job the first thing I did was checkout and read all the MPEG standards.
But I agree, the whale we need to go after is IEEE.
> the whale we need to go after is IEEE.
I wholeheartedly second this. I'm an individual member and a member of a specific IEEE society that sponsors a specific standard and I still have to pay for a copy. In contrast, the same standard has been adapted for specific industries and there are IEC, ITU and a SMPTE specs adopting it and those I can get for free. Doubly irritating because some of the most crucial standards like the 802 family are all paywalled. And it's not like it's warranted because if I need a standard I'm probably a vendor. Take high-speed Ethernet for example, there is such a proliferation of media types, lane counts, line encodings, FEC options and speed combinations that an engineer needs a reference from the source, and instead it's either third-party information or "stolen" PDFs.
The whole world benefits when our infrastructure can stay on spec and those specs are freely available for everyone. Specs are the vaccines holding civilization together.