Is standardization deemed to be against FS and how can it be tackled?

Scott Wilson scott.wilson at it.ox.ac.uk
Sat Jun 13 15:42:14 UTC 2015


> On 13 Jun 2015, at 12:12, Alessandro Rubini <rubini at gnudd.com> wrote:
> 
>> For consortia standards, the resulting standards tend to be free of cost
>> to access, have variable freedom from encumbrance to use [...]
> 
> It depends. Or maybe we think of different things about "consortia".
> IEEE stuff is not free of cost, but is freely implementable. I think
> this falls under consortia under your proposed split: it is not
> governamental "de jure" and not community.
> 
> But when I hear "consortium" I think more about bluetooth, zigbee, SD,
> PCI, such stuff.  This is usually neither available nor free to use.
> Usually you even have to pay the yearly fee to the Family if you produce
> compliant stuff (this is in addition to paying for conformance tests).
> 
> One example, but they are all similar: http://www.usb.org/developers/vendor/


Yes, this is true. I guess the picture is very variable with consortia-based standards as its up to the members to agree the rules. In some industries like TV this can be really restrictive and non-members can’t even read the standards; for web standards like W3 its less so.

> /alessandro

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