On Thu, Jan 03, 2002 at 05:20:33PM +0100, Trond Trosterud wrote: > > 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.
The ISO trial that was mentioned is about selling PDF-based standards for something like USD 25 via the net, and that seems to be an affordable price, according to people here on the list. Furthermore drafts of standards are available for no fee in ISO JTC 1, to facilitate the public commenting on standards. They are available via the various subcommitee web servers. A common entrance for the SCs of JTC 1 is http://www.jtc1.org/ . From the drafts you can get a good feeling of what a standard is all about, but for the precise standing you need to have the standard itself, plus associated amendments and corrigenda. But I would also really like to have ISO standards available for free. Some powers are working for this goal, lets see if they succeed. Kind regards Keld -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
