The problem with ISO and some of its member bodies is not just that the standards are not free, but that they are ridiculously expensive. You can hardly get a 10-page ISO standard for less than 50 CHF (the price of a thick textbook!), many of the more interesting ones cost well over 200 CHF. For comparison, ITU standards cost only between 20 and 30 CHF, which is far more reasonable, and you can even get up to three for free. ISO's document prices are at least a factor four too high, and it becomes ridiculous for the many ISO IT standards that are literally just copies of the corresponding ECMA or ITU version.
ECMA demonstrates very successfully, how you can run a standards body very comparable in structure and procedures to ISO, without charging for the documents. ECMA not only provides the PDF files for free, they will even send you paper versions or a CD-ROM for free if you don't have Internet access and ask them nicely (which used to be important for interested users from 3rd world countries). A small number of further ISO/IEC/JTC1 standards are already available freely for public download from http://www.iso.ch/ittf/ packaged as ZIP files, including for instance OSI, CGM, CC, computer telephony stuff, standards that include substantial source code, etc. Markus -- Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/> -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
