Markus writes: >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.
For all except large, rich companies, yes they certainly are, but since their purpose is to finance ISO itself I guess there are people who want an even higher price... Thus, the prices are not comparable to book prices, since they have a different purpose: They function as taxes for standard users, rather than as prices covering the expences of the authors and publishers. >ECMA demonstrates very successfully, how you can run a standards body >very comparable in structure and procedures to ISO, without charging for >the documents. >[...] Your ECMA example does not demonstrate #how# you can do it, but #that# you can do it. The point is not how to do it, technically, pdf-download-wise, but how to survive economically. The demonstration should thus not involve procedures for downloading, but account numbers. The point is not the technicalities, but the economy. ECMA obviously has smaller expences and/or other income sources than ISO and its national bodies. Perhaps ISO can manage an income cut, I do not know, but I guess that with smaller incomes at least Norwegian NTS will stop sending its experts to international meetings. (perhaps ECMA does not have such costs, perhaps they have inceome sources that ISO does not). Again, I have not seen the accounts, but this is where the arguments belong: How large are the incomes, what are the concequences if they disappear, how can the negative consequences be minimized. We do not have opposite goals, though. I certainly agree that ISO standards are too expensive, and I certainly see the price level as an obstackle to software development (or any development, for that matter) in 3rd world countries. And whereas rich companies in the west can pay for standards, they still are too expensive for private individuals, thus making volunteer-based software development of the Linux type much harder than it should be. Thus, the negative effects of the ISO policy are severe. More troublesome to ISO (suppose they care about neither Linux nor 3rd world countries) should be the fact that high prices make ISO standards more marginal (the famous example being GOS, the once-powerful Soviet standardisation body, that replaced koi-8 with ISO 8859-5, just to get the hex-value-based sorting (almost) right, but that never used 8859-5 on their own web pages... (there is no award for guessing what they used instead)). My point is: Yes, I want a different ISO price policy, too. But in order to get it we must be able to present an alternative income source to the standardisation bodies. In my opinion, this shoulc take form of a political campaign (eh, that last word was suddenly orwellian over-used). As an example, in december 2001 Unesco hosted a conference in Paris on language diversity & IT (don't remember exact title). I read the draft documents as part of the preparations for the Norwegian delegation, and one of the suggestions that was presented in the main document was indeed "freely available publications of international standards". A Unesco resolution by itself certainly does not change the world (and ISO is probably more worried about alternative publication channels, like the unicode web site, or like different samizdat publication channels), but it is a start. Just stating that the price is high is correct in itself, but it does not bring us closer to a solution. >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. This is very good (perphaps done to meet samizdat competition?). One way out (while waiting for funding) could be for ISO to release standards relevant to individuals (like the IT software standards we discuss here), but keep high prices for standards only relevant to large companies (like standards for building things that you cannot build unless you are part of a big company, IT hardware standards, etc). Trond. ------------------------------------------------------------------- Trond Trosterud t +47 7764 4763 Samisk institutt, Det humanistiske fakultet m +47 950 70140 N-9037 Universitetet i Troms�, Noreg f +47 7764 4239 [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.hum.uit.no/a/trond/ ------------------------------------------------------------------- -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
