Re: EHP External Hardware Proposal

Fred Smith wrote:

> From: hansw <hansw@...>
>
> > There is no excuse and I think the standards organizations, the
> standards
> committee members, and the entire process is corrupt. The bureaucrats
> and
> academics want to perpetuate the process until they retire, the
> industry
> participants are paid consultants wages, and don't have to do much
> work when
> at committee meetings, and the corporations that actually fund much of
> the
> standards process do everything in their power to make sure that their
>
> special little twist gets embedded in the standard.
> >
>
> Yep ! If the g-code standard was funded by tax money ( I'm not sure
> how it
> was funded ) there is no reason why they should charge anything at all
> for
> it..

The IEEE (Institute of Electronic and Electrical Engineers) is a
tax-exempt, not-for-profit organization.
(Or, is it a non-profit org., well a technical difference to the
lawyers.)
The EIA (Electronic Industry Association) is a bit more mercenary, and
must be a not-for-profit,
as they DO charge a substantial price for documents.

The sale of documents like this is what funds the standards committees
to do their work. They have
standardized such things as the TV broadcast format, SCSI, PCI, IEEE-488
(also known as GPIB),
RS-232 and an endless number of other schemes for communications or
compatibility between
equipment manufacturers.

> I don't think that our tax money paid for Rs274-D. But they took
> over the
> cost when they made it part of the ANSI system (probably paid a fee to
> EIA
> for the right to use the copyrighted document). If someone, whether
> gov,
> industry, professional organization or private individual, labels some
>
> document as a standard, it should become immediately exempt from all
> copyright protection, and in the public domain.

Can't be done, and it would actually be WORSE. These organizations DO
have some independence
from the industries that support them, and allow their staff to populate
the committees. IF the documents
were freely available, then the big corporations would have to fund the
organizations, and that would
be the foot in the door to totally controlling them. NOT a good idea!

Jon