What is the motivation for you to do free work for these parasites?
In most cases, both in scientific publishing and in writing standards, people aren't doing free work, they're getting paid by their employers. So the next question is what is the motivation of these employer to pay for you to work for these parasites. In most cases the answer is a mixture of prestige, advertising, influence and early access.
The typical situation in science is that you're expected to cover "100%" of your time through some combination of grants and teaching. There is no specific allocation for "professional service", but you're expected to do it anyway.
With standards bodies, it's common that some representative of each organization is required to attend meetings to retain voting privileges. So if the organization wants a chance to influence the Standard, they need to send people and pay for it. One reason is prestige/advertising, but a Standard also enables tactical advantages, e.g., (a) include feature X that lets us showcase our hardware or (b) prevent feature Y that would be expensive for us to implement.
As I wrote, we need standards, and those standards to a lot of good in terms of setting best-practices and documenting procedures than can result in repeatable, robust results. Being able to point to standards compliance is also helpful in reducing the effort involved in describing and justifying procedures/designs.
The problem is in the dissemination of the standards. Of course folks can try to implement and promulgate standards themselves, but IME they have a hard time getting traction without the "blessing" of a major organization.
And to be honest, contributing to a standard looks good on a resume.
Nothing in what I said pointed toward closed standards, and I wasn't referring to closed standards. In my field (acoustics/noise & vibration control) we generally don't have closed standards and rely on standards to produce results that we have confidence in.
I was imagining one thing, but apparently it's something else. What you said makes sense in your field (and in others), and of course, it's non-closed standarts
He can sell his experience to companies looking to implement those standards? Companies get a solution to the coordination problem of creating standards in the first place?
