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Comment by myself248 | Hacker News Reader

I'd love a better understanding of the intellectual encumbrance of Pantone colors, and whether RAL colors are more free in that regard.

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RAL is copyrighted, but they don't have a pack of legal maniacs chasing you down for using them. For example, Festool's specific green is RAL 6018 (Yellow Green) and you can use it as an interchange standard without paying them.

It's amazing that Pantone and Ral managed to get away with copyrighting something so fundemantal. Surely these should be international standards, like centremetres or Celsius.

Copyright is something automatic, it's also not like these companies have copyrighted the "color", but the mapping between color and description. The only way they wouldn't have a copyright is if they get challenged in court and loose. There is also a serious difference between RAL and Patone, RAL is managed by a non-profit corporation.

Is there much of a difference in the cost of it compared to pantone or some other system? I know pantone has more colours and seems to be added to more often, based on the wiki page.

RAL doesn't cost anything to use, as far as I know; like, people just make RAL 6018 filament for printing "Festool Green" stuff and put RAL 6018 on the product spec. They offer some certification stuff for more integrated uses and might have some licensing for software uses, I think? But the survival advice for Pantone is "duck and cover"; RAL has no such rep.

My RAL color fan (got mostly in order to match filament to colors) was $26.

Another aspect in addition to what others said: digital color libraries are generally available for free or low cost.

  - Pantone recently removed its color libraries from Adobe products to make them an additional subscription of $14.99/month
  - Pantone colors are always a subscription on color readers/spectrometers unless you buy X-Rite's high end readers. RAL is available for free on most color readers.
  - NCS is a bit between RAL and Pantone in that regard, they sell an affordable color reader (for its full spectrum capabilities) that includes the NCS library, but it is a paid subscription for other readers, albeit cheaper than Pantone.

To be frank, I suspect that there is little intellectual meat to either of these systems. They appear to both be no more than formally aproved indexes.

They produce calibration sets. I'm not sure how they choose the colours they do (nor the names), but their most important job is to distribute the color sets with perfectly consistent colors, which isn't "free" work.

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