VESA makes you pay $5000 to get legal access to the DisplayPort standard. That is not the issue here.

It is part of the issue here. This specific post is about the HDMI forum having an insanely restrictive NDA, but the broader problem of SDOs charging obscene amounts of money for what amounts to trivially reproduceable digital documents (or taking other measures to do everything they can to seal the standards from the public unless your willing to pay the obscene fees or <insert other absurd measure here>) is relevant to this post, and this comment, since the HDMI forum is doing exactly this kind of gatekeeping; it only differs in form, but not function.

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jrepinc 3 days ago | parent [-]

Yeah HDMI Forum shameful behavior in a way reminds me of those evil greedy scientific publishing houses. Standards and science should be open and free as in freedom to access AND implement and not gated behind some obscene monetary or other forms of restrictions, like patents. In this day and age these restrictions have no place and should be abolished.

	▲	BlueTemplar 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		So should HDCP. And DMCA. And platforms. And DRM in general. But this is basically asking for the USA to give up on their soft power (Hollywood, and over the Internet). It's something to aim for, but is still going to take decades. And you have to be careful about what might fill the power void (China, Russia...)

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TheAmazingRace 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Indeed. I'm pretty sure the issue is that the HDMI Consortium wants some kind of royalty for each device sold with a proper HDMI designation, whereas VESA doesn't care if you sell one device or a million devices with DisplayPort. You owe them nothing extra beyond the initial legal access fee.

Oh yeah, and the burdensome NDA that the HDMI Consortium requires its partners to agree to is another serious problem for the Linux driver.

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VerifiedReports 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Another example of something that shouldn't be accepted as a standard. If you want to be a standard, then the spec must be published to the public. DUH.

It's sad what people put up with now.