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Comment by ngrilly | Hacker News Reader

> Dive into the Standard: read the 628-page ISO GQL standard (cost: 217 CHF) for a comprehensive understanding of the language’s specifications.

You want to make this a standard? Then make it free. We live in 2024 in a world where most of the innovation in software has been driven by open source. I mean, the entire Internet has been built on specifications from the IETF and W3C available for free. Most programming languages are open source and their specification are available for free as well. If the IETF and the W3C can make their standards available online for free, then why ISO couldn't?

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You would need someone high up in ISO to feel strongly enough about that to take the revenue hit.

My only experience with ISO standards is the C++ standard, and the community works around the price by making draft copies available for free.

This is a guess on my part, but maybe the majority use case for ISO standards is companies buying copies for their employees or maybe even lawyers. They _have_ to have a copy if they're going to have products that conform to the industry standards, so ISO can charge whatever they want and it's just a minor expense for the business. Compare this with the "hackers in mom's garage" image of software and you see the difference.

If the ISO is not willing to change their mind on that question, then let's work with other standard organizations. ISO doesn't have a monopoly, as we've seen with the IETF and the W3C.

I've been in the situation of buying copies of these standards in my last two jobs, because we wanted to read and use these standards, because they are "standards" (standards on topics like functional safety, quality, and innovation). But as you can guess, the larger a company is, the more difficult it is to buy anything. And that's the problem with these standards. They can't be standards if people can't read and learn about them. What happens next is that you you have tons of people talking about these standards, without even having read them once, or not being able to check an assumption by going back to the source material. That stuff was ok 30 years ago, but not anymore: this is 2024 and we have Internet and open source.

Sorry to put it this way but what revenue hit? Who exactly is so stupid they'd pay for this standard that nobody asked for, nobody needs, and very few people care about?

Someone has to organize conferences and protocols for voting, and organize the documents and get them published. Nothing is free, someone has to organize things.

The alternative is what? Open Source? Where anybody can fork anything. One person puts out a standard, then another and another and suddenly there is no standard there is just a giant pile of one-off hacks.

Any Open Source project that has amounted to anything, guess what, has funding, and an organization. Some gatekeeper to make sure there is one truth.

Would SQL Exists today without some 'standards' body : "as standardized by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) "

> The alternative is what? Open Source? Where anybody can fork anything. One person puts out a standard, then another and another and suddenly there is no standard there is just a giant pile of one-off hacks.

Tell me you don't understand open source software without telling me.

Major OSS projects today have funding and corporate backing because the popularity earns you money. Not all major OSS projects start with funding and corporate backing (though some certainly do and that can be a leg up if it's done with good intention).

Exactly. Popular ones are funded.

The point was everyone was complaining about paying for a publication. But how do you fund publishing without paying? Everyone expects 'standards' to be free, but don't they take time and effort and organization?

GQL has existed for long time, as open source, and has evolved, with a community. But eventually there is a need to 'pay' to get funding, and industry backing to grow further. And a standards organization is valuable in doing that.

Complaining it isn't 'free' is the wrong part.

It's not particularly difficult to have an ISO standard be made freely available and published in https://standards.iso.org/ittf/PubliclyAvailableStandards/in...

You simply have to make the decision from the start and keep it through all the ISO approval process. That's how we made SPDX (ISO/IEC 5962:2021) and OpenChain (ISO/IEC 5230:2020) standards.

It's great that ISO is offering this possibility! But then, why don't we have more ISO standards freely available? Is it because the contributors don't want them to be free available, in order to sell books or trainings?

This is the same organization that passed the absolute hack Microsoft lobbied for as an international digital document standard. Never assume anything ISO does has any value, at the risk of locking yourself into some large organization's grift.

Can't answer that tbh, but really, W3C is nearly irrelevant today and lives on only in the minds of people who have this idea that so-called web standards are created by W3C. W3C is into CSS still (on life support, and arguably, to avoid the bad looks of a single "browser vendor" dominating the show). But eg W3C's last involvement with HTML was three years ago [1], and their last HTML recommendation was based on WHATWG HTML snapshot January, 2020 [2]. You can check the barren place that is W3C's site yourself. I wouldn't put forth W3C as a shining example of standardization, to say the least, given the state of the web and browser diversity.

Also, you've got to understand that ISO is a complicated association of national "standard bodies" of varying legal statue, held together by international treaties. Nothing is easy and quick in that kind of environment; it's a miracle that it can produce something at all in this day and age. A way of motivating domain experts to become standard editors in the past has been to sell the standard text at high enough prices, such that the editor's own privately published book (containing a commented version of the standard text) would sell better.

Now whether the world needs another graph query language I'm not sure tbh. Certainly, I thought that creating a standard from scratch by committee was deemed less desired when Prolog (and Datalog) exist, as ISO standards even. W3C had put a lot of effort into RDF/SPARQL, and TBL' involvement with graph knowledge bases predates even WWW [3].

[1]: https://github.com/w3c/htmlwg

[2]: https://sgmljs.net/docs/html200129.html and https://sgmljs.net/docs/html230116.html

[3]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENQUIRE

And still, I already paid the ISO standard (at least to some degree, in my country) by paying taxes and I still have to pay for a standard?

It's like having to pay for research I already paid for with my taxes... oh wait!

In my country, the ISO member org engaging in standardization (a pretty well-known one) isn't funded by taxes at all but is a non-profit, funded by member fees.

Even assuming the work of standardization bodies were tax-financed, that by itself still doesn't imply standards should be free of charge. It's the same thing when you have to pay a certain amount for any state or communal service you're receiving as an individual or business, such as idk real estate transactions or traffic management for construction or events, even though the service is performed by an authority or stage agency.

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