Robert Weir's Library tagged standards →  View Popular, Search in Google

"I have had the experience of having foreign government officials tell me that their preference would be to use an NFPA standard in a particular situation, but because of their desire to enter international markets they feel pressured to use only an International Organization for Standardization (ISO) standard. That’s crazy. All of us are probably already developing standards that are widely used internationally. We should all be able to participate internationally on a level playing field. In pursuing its trade initiatives, our government should make a priority of the protection of the right of standards developing organizations to offer their standards internationally and protect their intellectual property rights."

standards

A good example of how ISO fails to encourage harmonized standards. These function definitions would be perfect for reusing in a variety of other standards, or at least for harmonizing with other standards that define scientific functions, like ISO/IEC 29500 and ODF 1.2's OpenFormula. But even peer standards professionals in other ISO committees and liaisons are not given access to these standards. We would need to pay over $100 for the privilege of doing a better job writing ISO standards for free.

standards

"Telling when a standard is not open is even easier. Those involved in the struggle to establish an open document format know that very well. After some debate over a company owned document format, the owner decided to submit it for standardization. In the end, it became an ISO-standard, but that does not make it open, or useful, or important. Being developed in a transparent manner does. Listening to input does. Taking on board input counts even more. Meanwhile, another format was also being standardized. After a long fight, only one truly open standard remains, ODF."

odf standards

standards

"For people who adopt software, trying to judge the value of so-called “standards support” in a product can be an incredibly frustrating experience. Standards implementations often fail to live up to their promises and, worse, it can be very hard to tell in advance of installing and running the software whether or not the “standards support” it supposedly provides is actually going to meet your needs."

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standards

I think Sayer hints at the significance of the speech here. It is not merely a reiteration of the importance of open standards against vendor lock-in. We all understand that now. What is new here is the suggestion that European procurement should explicitly recognize consortia standards rather than giving formal recognition only to ISO standards.

This is an interesting idea. We try to avoid monopolies in other areas of economic life. Why should we then be satisfied with ISO having a monopoly on International Standards? A little competition in this area could be a healthy thing.

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"Given the funding cutoff, the IT department had no recourse except to stick with Microsoft Office, but along with Ecma, they helped to blur the definition of an open standard. If practical necessities require a government agency to set aside its commitment to archival security, open access, and related responsibilities, this should be stated candidly. Abatements can be changed later when financial or technical improvements make it possible to use open standards. But to declare something open when it is not does more than sow distrust—it pollutes future debate and perpetuates public ignorance. Furthermore, agencies should not accept uncritically a moniker of “openness” from other institutions, even highly regarded ones such as Ecma and ISO, when these institutions take a lax attitude toward the traits held
important in the open source movement."

ODF standards

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autoblog standards

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"Standards always imply wide public access, an openness of the standard in both setting of the standard as well as access to the standard. It is therefore important to realise that an Open Standard would necessarily have to meet higher standards of openness than those provided by article 41 of document SCP/13/2. It is furthermore important to add that 'de facto standards' are typically not standards, but vendor-specific proprietary formats that were, as the secretariat correctly pointed out in the introduction to this discussion, 'strong enough to impose themselves on the market.' It is for this imposition on the market that 'de facto standards' are commonly used to describe monopolistic situations and corresponding absence of competition, which conflict with the basic purpose and function of standards."

standards

Linus on standards

ooxml standards

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