[SystemSafety] Making Standards available to Standards Committees

jean-louis Boulanger jean.louis.boulanger at gmail.com
Sat May 7 11:37:50 CEST 2016


I am surprised by your mail ....
when a company participated to the standardization is not for free ...
it's because many interests should be discussed in the committee and the
standard contain constraints the market during 3 to 10 years
the rules is clear at the beginning and it's not because you want something
that you can change the rules ....

yes it's not perfect, yes some influence exist, yes is difficult to
introduce new idea, yes ....
but it's the rules ;-)



2016-05-07 8:41 GMT+02:00 Peter Bernard Ladkin <ladkin at rvs.uni-bielefeld.de>
:

> John Knight, Martyn Thomas, I, and others here, have occupied ourselves
> sporadically by commenting
> on the inefficacy of current arrangements for engineering standardisation.
> For example,
> http://scsc.org.uk/paper_126/protect_reg_01-Knight.pdf?pap=933 and
>
> http://www.rvs.uni-bielefeld.de/publications/WhitePapers/RVSsfssPrinciples.pdf
>
> This week at a meeting of the German National Committee responsible for
> functional safety of E/E/PE
> systems (and therefore IEC 61508 matters), the chair of a Working Group
> complained about the
> unavailability of standards for standards-committee work. The German
> electrotechnical standards
> organisation DKE makes all German standards available to all standards
> committees, but German
> standards are often translations into German of ISO or IEC standards, and
> inadequate for work with
> international import, for which one needs the ISO or IEC originals.
>
> The official position is that each standards-committee member must buy
> hisher own copy of a
> standards document which is needed. There is no discretion; the IEC (or
> ISO) holds copyright and
> makes the document available for purchase, and German copyright law is
> pretty rigid.
>
> This situation is appropriately characterised as "absurd" (there was
> general agreement).
>
> Some standards organisations, and some Secretaries of committees in them
> (who are
> standards-organisation employees) make discretely available to those
> committee members with a need
> the FDIS of a standard, which may differ in only minor ways from the
> published standard. The FDIS
> will be prominently watermarked "only to be used for standards development
> purposes". I don't know
> the status of such practice. The CDVs and FDIS are made available by
> international agreement to all
> standards workers and indeed competent engineers at development time, as
> part of the process of
> eliciting comments, but I don't know what governs their use, if anything
> at all, after the standard
> is published.
>
> The Brits apparently have no problem. The BSI makes available British
> Standards for its committees
> to work with, and these differ in only formal ways from the international
> standards where there are
> such, but apparently sufficiently to render inoperative the IEC copyright.
>
> Germany could do similarly. First, accept English as an appropriate
> language for German standards,
> through a change in the law. But then a couple of publishing houses would
> have their business model
> trashed, and "jobs would be lost", which is a discussion-ending comment
> here. (The usual response,
> that everyone would be better off by paying the same people the same money
> to do nothing, has little
> or no traction here.)
>
> There might be something to this. There were lots of people in the room,
> and use of the word
> "absurd" was not challenged. Maybe this could be taken to the DKE CEOs and
> thereby on to the IEC?
> The IEC is pretty intransigent about its business model. But the issue
> would be on the table, and
> that is a prelude to any movement on it.
>
> There is considerable disagreement with parts of the IEC business model.
> Companies and people
> provide their work on standards for free; the IEC makes money off it, and
> there is no quid pro quo
> arrangement at all. *Everybody* brings this up. An engineer costs hisher
> company let's say €400 a
> day, so even a moderately passive committee member will cost hisher
> company €4,000 a year; say
> €12,000 for work on a document for three years. For travel costs, add some
> 50% on top of that (at
> those prices, you wonder when decent videoconferencing is going to become
> generally available?). And
> an active member costs ten times that much or even more (travel costs
> remain similar, though).
>
> 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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> systemsafety at TechFak.Uni-Bielefeld.DE
>
>


-- 
Mr Jean-louis Boulanger
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