Open letter drafted against what’s seen as unjustified profiteering
Many of the almost 24,000 technical standards maintained by the International Standards Organization (ISO) are subject to copyright restrictions and are not freely available. Two weeks ago, Jon Sneyers, senior image researcher at Cloudinary and co-chair of the JPEG XL (ISO/IEC 18181) adhoc group, invited fellow technical experts to collaborate on an open letter urging the ISO to set its standards free. In an email to The Register, Sneyers explained that paywalled, copyrighted standards inhibit education and innovation. « Specifically for JPEG XL (or codecs in general), a free spec makes it a lot easier for external enthusiasts to make an alternative implementation, » he said « Often this would be done as a free-and-open-source software hobby project, not necessarily with the goal to make a better implementation, but just as a personal learning project. With a free spec, there might be a few of such attempts, some failing, some succeeding. » The value of alternative implementations, he contends, is that they help verify the correctness of the spec. He notes that libjxl, the reference implementation of the JPEG XL spec, is the only such library at the moment, which makes it less likely discrepancies between the spec and the implementation will be found and more likely that libjxl, compliant or not, will become the de facto standard, thereby diluting the authority of the ISO spec. « With a paywalled spec, there will likely be no such attempts, because a hobbyist is unlikely to pay a big fee up front just to read the spec (which is something you’d do before you even decide to have a go at it and try to implement it), » he said. Via Twitter, Ian Graham, senior lecturer in operations management at the University of Edinburgh, explained the problem with paywalled specifications succinctly.
