[Wikipedia-l] Dream a little...
Alphax (Wikipedia email)
alphasigmax at gmail.com
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".
--
Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
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"We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
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