Many other standards organizations have figured out funding models that don't shut out hobbyists, the interested public, academics, and professionals with tangential (rather than direct, funded) interest. ISO has not. They are behind the times in this regard.
Do you have examples of those standards organizations? The only other one that I have first hand experience with is ANSI and I know they charge for their standards. I have been dealing with X12 EDI and some of the standards for that are close to $1000 and that is for a single file format. The health care X12 standard has dozens of file format standards.
ITU standards are usually available free of charge too.
$100 isn't a roadblock to a funded implementation effort, but that's not the only meaningful interaction a functioning society can or should have with a standard. $100 is a large roadblock to many other types of meaningful interaction.
"What they should be" is always an arguable position. We can only hold them accountable to their own charter.
Why on earth would you think that? I don't give one whit about their charter. Neither should you. In all likelihood, neither do they.
Its also worth noting that you can basically find all of the standards in their draft forms for free. You need to be slightly careful about the revision numbers, but often the drafts are identical to the ISO ones. You really only need to pay for the draft if you want to be certified as in compliance or are an enterprise user. In which case the fee is paltry.
Is there a way to search for these? I've tried trawling through many sites to find draft versions of ISO 32000-2:2017 but it seems to have fallen down a memory hole. Is there a naming convention around drafts or is it just luck of the draw? Apologies is this is not a valid query.
"What they should be" is always an arguable position. We can only hold them accountable to their own charter.
Why on earth would you think that? I don't give one whit about their charter. Neither should you. In all likelihood, neither do they.
Because I'm not an idealist, and I don't want to be one. I'd like to think I'm a practical person who looks at what can be done realistically. It has worked out OK for me so far. YMMV.
Many standards are simply guidelines or arbitrary rules. Someone just makes it up. For e.g. i++ has a specific meaning according to a language standard. Or the width of a door should be 36" inches. That is something someone just made up. You can make up a standard yourself. Other kinds of standards have years of work behind them, like engineering standards for bridges, or food safety standards. Someone has to pay the…
Someone already pays for the work of making standards. And it's not ISO. Someone has to pay for the work for implementing them too, but not for accessing the standard itself. Lot's of things were not free, because of someone trying to sit in the middle, where they shouldn't have.
I don't think you quite understand how ISO works, so its not really productive to have this conversation. Have a nice day.
ISO is full of vested interests that don't want hobbyists, the interested public, academics, and professionals to access the documents and be able to implement them at a lower cost.
This has always been my opinion. Plus, I've found them ripe with anti-patterns that contradict what they actual iso standards stand for.
I've been part of a team developing C++ compilers and run-time libraries. We used the final draft, which (at least for C++) is freely available. I suspect anyone relying on the final text (were it to differ from the last public draft) would be disappointed to discover that pretty much no-one uses it. It doesn't seem to me to be a terrible trade-off to say that ad-hoc use via public drafts is fine, but if you need to…
... anyone relying on the final text... would be disappointed to discover that pretty much no-one uses it. Indeed! A "standard" that costs $100 to read is not actually a standard at all. The standard is, by definition, what the users think it is.
Someone already pays for the work of making standards. And it's not ISO. Someone has to pay for the work for implementing them too, but not for accessing the standard itself. Lot's of things were not free, because of someone trying to sit in the middle, where they shouldn't have.
I don't think you quite understand how ISO works, so its not really productive to have this conversation. Have a nice day.
It's clearly not working right, if it's still charging for actual access.
Like W3C? “Standards” funded by Google’s ad monopoly? How is that going for them? The demand for everything to be “free” is destroying the idea of neutral standard. Standard must be funded somehow. The ISO model has worked for decades. The W3C model, where you don’t charge for either the standard or the products, has become a tire fire.
The W3C's failures pale in comparison to what I hear of the ISO MPEG process, in which companies compete to put as much of their patented technology in the codec standard as possible without any regard for coherence. ISO is worse than the W3C.
ISO at least still releases real standards with multiple implementations. Web standards by contrast have basically become a pretense, as the actual standard is defined by Google’s implementation.
Like W3C? “Standards” funded by Google’s ad monopoly? How is that going for them? The demand for everything to be “free” is destroying the idea of neutral standard. Standard must be funded somehow. The ISO model has worked for decades. The W3C model, where you don’t charge for either the standard or the products, has become a tire fire.
Just because the standard is free does not mean that any single implementation is, you are free to charge for software implementing a standard just as you would be otherwise. A proper standard needs to be free (both as in speech and beer), otherwise it needs investment to see that a implementation meets the standard (which in itself goes against the idea of having standards) or to modify it to propose improvements. T…
I respectfully disagree. I’d much rather pay $50 for a browser, part of which goes to paying for the R&D and the standard, than have the status quo, where you have a de facto standard based on the implementations defined “by the companies who benefit from the standard.” Because that’s just turned into the ad tech industry dictating browser standards. I don’t think that’s healthy. It was way better when you had something like POSIX, which was defined by multiple competing vendors, where the R&D was paid for by license fees, than the “free” ecosystem where everything is bankrolled by ad money.