Celebrating open standards around the world [LWN.net]

Opensource.com celebrates World Standards Day on October 14. "Whether in the world of software, where without standards we would have been unable to connect the world through the Internet and the World Wide Web, or the physical world, where standards make nearly everything you buy easier, more useful, and safer, the world would be a difficult place to navigate without standards. And critical to the useful of standards is making them available to all in an accessible, free format, unencumbered by legal or other hurdles."

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Celebrating open standards around the world

Posted Oct 15, 2016 2:49 UTC (Sat) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (4 responses)

On this day companies throughout the world introduce new incompatible standards to celebrate this event.

Celebrating open standards around the world

Posted Oct 15, 2016 4:47 UTC (Sat) by felixfix (subscriber, #242) [Link] (3 responses)

That's the wonderful thing about standards: there are so many to choose from.

Celebrating open standards around the world

Posted Oct 16, 2016 0:11 UTC (Sun) by gerdesj (subscriber, #5446) [Link] (2 responses)

On Friday I was whining about RJ11 to BT phone adapters - why on earth didn't British Telecom use RJ11 like everyone else? (I thought) [2]

Then I took a quick look at what other countries use for telephony connectors. Then I looked at what BT (formerly the General Post Office - GPO) used in the past. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPO_telephones for example, and feel free to shudder [1].

I stopped whining and bought some cheap RJ11 to BS 6312 connectors.

Hmmm, now to look into codecs ...

Cheers
Jon

[1] One of my employees is an ex BT bod and remembers
[2] Turns out a fair few places use BT's connectors - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_telephone_socket

Celebrating open standards around the world

Posted Oct 16, 2016 13:08 UTC (Sun) by ianmcc (guest, #88379) [Link] (1 responses)

You are lucky that you can do this yourself. In Australia, we don't have a 'demarcation point' at all; for anything involving equipment that can *potentially* be connected to the phone network, you are supposed to get a professional in to do the wiring. Yes, that means that any CAT5 etc home wiring is technically illegal here! You are supposed to have a licence to make your own network cables too, but I've never heard of that being enforced (certainly, the Chinese-made cables you buy in a store were not assembled by anyone with an ACMA license!).

Celebrating open standards around the world

Posted Oct 19, 2016 2:59 UTC (Wed) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link]

It's like the pre-1980s US!

I like that we invented the acoustic-coupler modem so that computers could talk to the phone company with no electrons touching.

Celebrating open standards around the world

Posted Oct 16, 2016 3:31 UTC (Sun) by roc (subscriber, #30627) [Link] (1 responses)

So this year World Standards Day is on October 14, but the USA celebrates it on October 27, and the Standards Council of Canada on October 5. Are they *trying* to be ironic?

Celebrating open standards around the world

Posted Oct 16, 2016 4:07 UTC (Sun) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

October 27 is obviously superior - it can be divided by 3 not only once, but twice!

It's not about open standards, just standards

Posted Oct 17, 2016 17:13 UTC (Mon) by david.a.wheeler (subscriber, #72896) [Link] (1 responses)

This isn't about open standards. It's just about standards. The ISO announcement, for example, never uses the word "open": http://www.iso.org/iso/news.htm?refid=Ref1656

Many organizations think that it's okay for standards to discriminate against OSS projects, under the notion that this is "reasonable" - even though that's not reasonable. Organizations like ISO make a lot of money by getting authors to work for free and give ISO proprietary rights, so they naturally think that free access to the standard (document) is not necessary. You can see a lot of organizations working to redefine "open standard" here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_standard

I personally like Digistan's "Free and Open Standard" definition, more information here: http://www.digistan.org/text:rationale

It's not about open standards, just standards

Posted Oct 18, 2016 10:57 UTC (Tue) by dps (guest, #5725) [Link]

If I remember correctly 1/3 of the funding of the ISO was to come from the sale of copies of standards. This clearly implies that copies of the standards must be fairly expensive because not many people are likely to buy a copy of a standard and those that do are unlikely to buy many copies. In at least some cases, in particular the SAS and scsi enclsure services standards, the draft standards are free and include the information only otherwise available by buying a copy of the standard. I can ask a SCSI device about its health and serial numbers (more than 10 would not be uncommon for a real SCSI device), read and write data, format it, etc just by reading the free draft standard.