New International Standard: ISO/IEC 9945:2002

An anonymous reader writes "ISO/IEC and The Open Group announce international approval of the joint revision to POSIX® and the Single UNIX® Specification. More info here."

Comments

Do standards cost to much for the open source?

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the problems with standards is the fact that they cost too damn much especially for free or open software users. I usually try to collect the last publicly available draft or copy that was used for voting and do my work with that. This has worked pretty well the the IEEE 802 standards and the SCSI and FireWire standards. Anybody have a link to such a copy of this standard?

Re:Do standards cost to much for the open source?

[Confuse Ed]

If you follow through a few levels of links from the artice, the standard is available online (for free) at:

http://www.unix.org/version3/online.html

You have to register (your name and email address) and agree to some terms and conditions to be allowed to read it.

Interestingly they also thought it important to answer the seemingly pointless question : how many API's are there? with a bar chart showing the number in a variety of specifications!

Re:Do standards cost to much for the open source?

[steveheath]

Open standards are normally cited as the basis of OSS. Closed standards are the problem (see Word format), where there is no way to be sure you are actually going to be compatible. Open standards allow freedom of choice for the app-user, encourage competition on the basis of functionality and are generally a good thing(tm).

Anyway, the link on the page can be followed to the spec, free registration required.

Excellent

[drdink]

Personally, I think this is great. Bringing SUS and POSIX together will make things much more portable once people actually meet the standard. The alternative is to have 47,000 different standards that all specify different things and then when you, the programmer and/or user, build your system, you must choose which one you want to meet.