Anyhow, yes, it’s important for RFP marketing bullet point compliance — for the governments that now mandate “open standards”. So, then, as you said — it’s just a bullet in a marketing presentation — what’s the value in worrying about how good a standard is at all?

That was my point.

They don’t even know what standards are. Their everyday standards are defined by the tools they use, and the popularity of these tools are leveraged by marketing statements as “this stuff follows ISO standards”, whatever this really means.

About ISO being compromised, we, the tech guys, know that. But people writing RFPs don’t. They just know there is one single global standardization body and they have been told that standards are good, so let’s just use their standards. They don’t use to think too much about these things…

I still think it’s great that we have standards for car parts and everything — but in terms of software most “standards” are a complete joke — especially unimplementable ones, which seem to be getting to be more and more acceptable.

I am not sure what you mean about non-developers caring. Naturally you do have the government mandate to use “open standards”, though in this case this is just an illusion. If I am not an auto-maker (or working on my car), the idea that the car is compliant in terms of it’s bolt size is immediately less interesting.

Not to be confused with say, certifications and testing, which say it can withstand a crash test. That’s a little bit different — and concentrates on the important part — results — not implementations.

But unfortunately “ISO standards” are what governments tend to use. This is the words they put in their Request For Proposals when they are going to buy things. These nasty “ISO standards” are the words they use to claim how they’ll interoperate and trade across borders. And also how public institutions will interoperate with private institutions. Over time, it defines also how private institutions use technology.

So yes, ISO standards does not matter from a developer standpoint, but they are crucial in shaping the non-developer flow of information.

You, as a developer, can use whatever you want or like. But if you want to interoperate with non-developer folks, you – the smarter guy in this context – will have to use what they use, and they use what have a stronger marketing force as “this is an ISO standard”. This is why good ISO standards are so important.

I am increasingly coming to the belief that standards bodies are useless in software and that only specifications — whether held by groups of people or even benevolent dictators — are actually worth anything.

Do I care about engine screw sizes and the proper widths for railroad track? Totally. Software? Not so much.

Perhaps it is analogous to why in the US we don’t require a PE for Software Engineers — it’s not really Engineering, but just Computer Science / Design / Math. There’s nothing wrong with any of those things, but the traditional rigours of “standards” don’t apply. That should be ok.

Some of the other standards bodies seem pretty bad too — creating standards that often can’t be implemented or just serve to declare an existing single vendor’s implementation a standard. That practice is pretty rampant.

Kinda sad.

Again though, given success of things like XMLRPC (and lots of things like it), perhaps all these things can be totally ignored now. Imagine all the time that’ll free up.

Fortunately there are organizations such as the OSI that can generally be trusted. Perhaps they need to extend their approach to document formats?

I completely agree!!

byez
Luca