Re: [gpsd-dev] Copy of IEC 61162-1

[Sanjeev Gupta]

On Wed, Apr 8, 2015 at 3:41 AM, Raphael Jacquot <address@hidden> wrote:

you gotta love those standards that only very rich entities can implement because they’re the only ones able to afford the document...

I disagree.

If I was developing a GPS device, the cost of the IEC standard would disappear into the noise.  If I was not "very rich", and not"able to afford the document", I perhaps would not be able to afford a textbook on writing a state-machine parser.

If I am developing a GPS plotter, similar.

Textbooks are not free, in general, and neither are these standards.  And most standards you would need are available, at no direct financial cost, by driving down to your nearest University Library and looking in their Reference section.  They are sitting on the shelves, neatly labelled.
 
(I am not defending their model, just that if a $500 expenditure is going to make your R&D budget collapse, perhaps you should not be selling navigation devices).

And if we are speaking of the GPSD project, again, $300 is peanuts.  We have spent more than that in time discussing this thread.  I will gladly pay for a paper copy to be shipped from ANSi to esr, or whoever is going to make sense of NMEA.  Others on the list have spent much more out of their pockets on test equipment.

This is what I asked to start with: if the issue is money, cost of a copyright copy, I can do that.  I see no reason to fight over that, my ISP charges me every month despite my telling him "information wants to be free".  However, if the issue is that the Project wishes to prove that it is a clean implementation, and reverse-engineered, then, free or not, we should not look at the Standard, even if NMEA left a copy in our mailbox.

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Sanjeev Gupta
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