> "if I spent the time, risk, effort, and money to develop the pre-eminent protocol and hardware used by most TV's in the world... would I want to give that work away for free?"

This is absolutely fine. But it should preclude them from becoming a public standard.

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throw0101a 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

> This is absolutely fine. But it should preclude them from becoming a public standard.

Define "public standard". And how is HDMI one of them?

HDMI is a private bundle of IP that the license holders are free to give (or not give) to anyone. We're not talking about a statue by a government 'of the people' what should be public. No one is mandated by any government to implement it AFAICT: and even if it was, it would be up to the government to make sure they only reference publicly available documents in laws.

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andybak 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Devil's Advocate time. Would the result of that be better or worse quality public standards?

(I don't actually know what I think off the cuff - but it's the obvious follow on question to your statement and I don't think your statement can stand on it's own without a well argued counter)

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dwattttt 3 days ago | parent [-]

It's a fine question. I think the onus is on public regulatory bodies responsible for the standards; if they aren't able to pay for the work to be published as an open standard, it wasn't worth the cost.

	▲	rcxdude 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Standards also benefit the industry as a whole, and it's generally in the interests of the companies involves to participate in the standardisation process anyway. Charging for the description of them is just a cherry on top (compared to e.g. licensing any relevant patents), I don't believe it's at all required to incentivize a standardization process. (this is of course looking at interoperation standards - regulatory bodies are going to be more concerned with e.g. safety standards)