Keld Simonsen wrote on 2002-01-03 21:32 UTC: > I agree that the best way would be to have the standards available, > at least on the web, free of charge. > > And as you know, there is a way to get very close to this, > that I did not mention in my last mail. The way is to participate > directly in the standardization process (as you do). Then you > get access to the restricted portions of the standardization webs > that you are working for, and there you can find almost everything > including what is called Final Texts, which should be as good > as the published standards, at least technically.
The crucial point is not that *I* have free access to standards. The point is that *everyone* needs to have free access to standards. Standards are like computer networks: Their value is proportional to the square of the number of people knowing and using them. ISO's prices are not helping in make these standards valuable in that sense, because only a few gurus have actually ever seen them, and the square of a small number of gurus is still very small ... 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/
