The people requiring adherence to a specific standard are not the people who then need to pay to see what they're supposed to be adhering to :(.

Strictly, just because the standard costs money doesn't mean that the information within it is otherwise unavailable. The C++ spec is an amusing example of this: the actual spec costs $$$, but the final draft is freely available. I can't imagine they sell many copies. I know that back when I was employed to work on a C++ compiler I only had access to the draft.

If demonstrating conformance is important, I suspect that the cost of access to specifications is only going to be a small fraction of the cost of certification. And as I understand things, it's certification that's the target of charging for specifications.

I am not sure if this is what happens, but I could imagine an arrangement where you have a standard, and in order to advertise that you meet the standard, you are required to pay a fee to the standards body, and that fee is used to fund an audit to verify that you adhere to the standard.

It would be nice if, for example, USB did this so that I know a USB cable actually works with a specific standard before I buy it.

In the world they operated in when this started was in a big corporate environment, gatekeeping was a feature. Anyone who needed a standard could already get it for free through their companies records department.

At my first corporate job the first thing I did was checkout and read all the MPEG standards.

But I agree, the whale we need to go after is IEEE.

Both can be true. Promoting a standard isn’t free, and having licensing and certification fees, especially in an industry where such practices make a standardization org get taken more seriously, is a reasonable strategy. We’re lucky that our industry moved in a different direction!

I think people have a flipped understanding of how these standards come to be.

They don't gather industry experts in a conference room and whiteboard out a perfect design that everyone agrees on and then go off to build products.

What happens is that companies develop products and services, and at some point it becomes more useful for those products to inter operate and protocols/interfaces between them need to be agreed upon. Oftentimes it's the mutant bastard children of the existing approaches by multiple stakeholders, encumbered by patents and legacy.

Adherence to a standard is not the goal, defining interoperability between existing systems is. And everyone participating is already a paying member of SMPTE.

It’s a proprietary standard moving to an open standard