This might just be me being a joyless communist, but I think that all technical standards should be freely accessible.
Or even as a "middle" ground, all withdrawn, superseded, and "no-longer-relevant" ones should be released into the public domain.
gayass goddess of tech and photos
- she/her
- ambersplace.github.io/
ask me about my computers or film cameras -
tgirl tummy wonder
you may know me as catgirlthighhighs on Tumblr
You must log in to comment.
in reply to @lethalbit's post:
wait oh my god are they not???? I assumed you could get ahold of that kind of info by like, jumping through some hoops and writing to the ISO or whatever
At least when adherence to the standard is required by some law, it seems like it should be a requirement.
In the EU, this is actually the case! There was an EU court judgment about this recently:
https://curia.europa.eu/jcms/upload/docs/application/pdf/2023-06/cp230110en.pdf
https://curia.europa.eu/jcms/upload/docs/application/pdf/2024-03/cp240041en.pdf
Apparently there wasn't a lot of English-language press coverage about this, but it was in the German news in a couple of places, e. g.:
https://www.heise.de/news/EuGH-Entscheid-Europaeische-Normen-muessen-gratis-zugaenglich-sein-9646757.html
Sadly, the practical implementation of "freely accessible" is quite limited. CEN/CENELEC has a web page at https://has.standards.eu/ that provides access to the standards in question, but if I'm reading it right:
- it (currently?) only covers the 4 specific standards (related to toy safety) that were the subject of the court case
- access is provided via the individual national standards bodies, who may implement geo-blocking
- the standards are only provided for online reading - they claim you're not even allowed to download or print them
Good deal! I mean, the ideal would be "once the government makes it de facto law, they had best pay for it and print it where everybody can get at it," but baby steps...
