[Wikipedia-l] Dream a little...

Thu Oct 26 23:55:01 UTC 2006

Rob Seaman wrote:
<snip>
> A more revolutionary suggestion is to open up the technical standards  
> process.  Many international standards are proprietary, such as  
> ISO-8601 that any of you who were engaged in Y2K remediation efforts  
> must surely be familiar with.  Familiar with, but perhaps have never  
> seen a copy of, because they charge real bucks.  Another example just  
> from the area of timekeeping is ITU-R TF.460-6.  What is this you  
> say?  The internationally recognized (e.g., by our State Dept.)  
> definition of Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).  UTC underlies  
> standard civil time throughout the world.  Here is a theater-of-the- 
> absurd quote from the minutes of a recent ITU meeting of their  
> working party 7A:
> 
> 	"After the introduction of the document the WP-7A counsellor
> 	informed WP-7A that a preliminary document i.e. the PDRR,
> 	could not be circulated beyond WP-7A according to ITU-R
> 	resolutions nor could the currently in effect Recommendation
> 	ITU-R TF.460-6, be attached to the SRG report with an
> 	explanation of proposed changes since all ITU-R
> 	Recommendations are only sold by the ITU-R."
> 
> To give you a sense of the kind of service opening this standard up  
> would provide, the ITU (International Telecommunications Union) is  
> debating removing any connection between UTC (i.e., the time on your  
> wall, your wrist, your cell-phone and your laptop) and the motion of  
> the Sun in the sky, by eliminating leap seconds.  Small in the short  
> term.  World-changing in the long term.
> 
> Vast number of other standards documents that underlie the  
> infrastructure of the modern world are similarly protected behind  
> proprietary walls.  I recall a piece from the early days of Wired  
> magazine describing one noble soul's fruitless efforts to convince  
> ISO to loosen their proprietary policies.
<snip>

Oh golly yes! My major gripe with the IEEE is that they won't accept
public domain documents - I recently had to work with their software
design document guidelines and was informed by my supervisor "this is a
copyrighted document, look after it".

-- 
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