[SystemSafety] Fwd: Re: Making Standards available to Standards Committees

[Peter Bernard Ladkin]

On 2016-05-07 19:58 , Derek M Jones wrote:
> There is only a problem if you put up with bureaucratic capture
> that is the norm of all standards' organizations.

Many people just think about standards which they themselves encounter. I don't find it helpful to
draw abstract conclusions from a limited sample.

Adequate protection of intellectual property is key to developing technical standards.

If company A has developed a gadget G which people find useful and build into their systems, and
there are lots of companies imitating G as a consequence, then that community mind find it useful to
write a standard which describes a generic G, so that people who use G can rely on a particular
functionality which the standard will describe. People from A and other G-like-gadget providers,
along with their customers, will be negotiating the standard. Those negotiators will be arguing
about the relative merits of various intricate designs, which usually means the IP involved in those
designs has to be exposed to some extent to all those negotiators. If you don't have ways of
protecting that IP while enabling it to be shared amongst the negotiators, then a standard adequate
to the purpose of defining a good generic G is unlikely to be developed.

> The C++ committee simply puts their drafts on Github:
> ....
> The C committee makes available a draft that is not
> the ISO document:

No programming language has IP protection issues of the sort I just described. The substance of a
programming language is syntax and semantics, and if neither of those is completely public then the
language won't work.

PBL

Prof. Peter Bernard Ladkin, Faculty of Technology, University of Bielefeld, 33594 Bielefeld, Germany
Je suis Charlie
Tel+msg +49 (0)521 880 7319  www.rvs.uni-bielefeld.de







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