SPDX Becomes Internationally Recognized Standard for Software Bill of Materials [LWN.net]

SPDX Becomes Internationally Recognized Standard for Software Bill of Materials

Posted Sep 11, 2021 14:12 UTC (Sat) by Vipketsh (guest, #134480)
In reply to: SPDX Becomes Internationally Recognized Standard for Software Bill of Materials by jebba
Parent article: SPDX Becomes Internationally Recognized Standard for Software Bill of Materials

That's one big complaint I have with ISO in general: their standards are completely inaccessible to private citizens, especially ones from poorer countries. It is just not reasonable to pay $200 to check a few things.

For computer related stuff things are passable since many of their standards either have draft versions available (e.g. C/C++) or are published elsewhere (e.g. JPEG/h26x at ITU) that make them available for free. If all else fails, for some common ones, eastern friends are usually intrepid enough to make them available on the net somewhere.

For non-computer related things ISO is just crazy. Some years ago I was interested in some details on electrical installations that turns out are from ISO standards -- lot's of them, as it would appear that they cut the complete thing up into a large number of standards each of about 10 pages. ISO being ISO each of those documents cost starting from about $50. No way any private person just curious about something can afford to pay for all this stuff.

Before the internet things were workable: as a private person you joined the appropriate library for a month for a (very) small fee, dug through as many standards as you needed, made notes of things of interest, possibly even photocopied some pages. In the digital age none of that seems possible.

to post comments

SPDX Becomes Internationally Recognized Standard for Software Bill of Materials

Posted Sep 11, 2021 14:36 UTC (Sat) by jebba (guest, #4439) [Link] (1 responses)

The old NASA standards were all public and online. Now NASA is proprietary too. FWIW, I pulled together all I could find of NASA's last open standards related to wiring, soldering, etc. Maybe you find it interesting:

https://code.forksand.com/forksand/NASA-standards

https://code.forksand.com/forksand/NASA-standards/raw/bra...

SPDX Becomes Internationally Recognized Standard for Software Bill of Materials

Posted Sep 11, 2021 15:16 UTC (Sat) by calumapplepie (guest, #143655) [Link]

To be clear: NASA now says "our standard is that published by $LARGER_INDUSTRY_GROUP , which will charge money". They don't say "We produced this standard, so you need to pay us money for it". Copyright doesn't apply to official works of the US federal government, so they can't do that. There are still many NASA standards that are open: of course, that's generally because they are spaceship-specific.

SPDX Becomes Internationally Recognized Standard for Software Bill of Materials

Posted Sep 16, 2021 23:12 UTC (Thu) by pj (subscriber, #4506) [Link]

If that standard is incorporated by reference into law (eg. it's part of the building code), then you should see if the Internet Archive has a copy - they've made a bit of a crusade of buying a copy and publishing it, and since the law - even the bits of it incorporated by reference - can't be copyrighted, they've won every case brought against them. https://archive.org/details/govlaw