On 23 Dec 2003, at 18:32, Andrew Savory wrote:
On 24 Dec 2003, at 01:53, Stefano Mazzocchi wrote:
We are escaping the gravitational attraction of XMLSchema.. slowy, but we are.
To a "published" standard that you have to pay for? No thanks!
So, let's see, you would much rather have all your CD burner vendors come up with their own specification on how to burn CDs much like DVDs did? or wait, you want a non-ISO way to encode dates? or to encode charsets? or country code and names?
should I continue?
Yes, ISO documents are payware. Did this prevent people from implementing a ISO-9660 file system driver to read CD-ROMs?
Of course, it would be better to have all those ISO documents available for free.. and I'm sure they will do, pretty soon, since it's a thing of the past and those organization take forever to change the way they do things because it impacts their workflow and their mindsets.
ISO documents are payware if you get them from the source, but they are, AFAIK, freely redistributable. I never had a hard time finding SGML-related ISO standards on the net and I'm pretty sure ISO doesn't run against who redistributes them.
But if you are better off with crap just because the add says it's free (as in beer), well, this is (supposed to be) a free (as in speech) world after all. You won't be the first to fall into this marketing trap (free up front, pay the price later).... stores have been doing this for ages.
-- Stefano.
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