Re: The pain with standards

[Markus Kuhn <Markus.Kuhn@cl.cam.ac.uk>]

Robert Dewar wrote:
[Ada95 standard is freely available online]
> [...] All the Ada achievment
> shows is that it is possible, but it was FAR from easy. It took a huge
> amount of work, and at one point it looked like the entire ISO
> standardization process would fail because of the insistence on free
> availability.
> 
> Yes it is possible, but the experience with the Ada standard is not
> encouraging at all from the point of view of setting a copyable
> precedent. Standards organizations are VERY insistent about obtaining
> and exploiting copyrights, it is one of the major sources of funding
> for these organizations.

Ada95 is not the first and only freely available ISO standard.
Many of the newer standards of the SGML committee are available
online, some of the CLNP OSI standards are. Standards like ISO 8859,
ODA, ISO 9660, and many more are freely available from ECMA, etc.
I am sure I could easily come up with a list of over 30 information
technology ISO standards that are available freely from non-ISO
sources. The trick usually is that a standard is developed outside
the ISO system by the volunteering experts and published first through
another body (ECMA, IETF, etc.), and then just sent through the ISO
fast-track procedure for the ratification.

ISO' central secretariat in Geneva is funded only to 20% from document
sales and to 80% from member organization contributions (according
to an ISO brochure that they gave me in 1995). It also escapes my
understanding, why you need ~130 employees in Geneva to handle
a set of only around 12 000 documents and why it is necessary for
ISO to operate their own very expensive printshop. I visited ISO CS
a few years ago and I had a very clear impression that there is
much opportunity for cost savings in this quasi-monopoly company.
Their business model seems to have been unchanged since when they
started to publish screw thread and chemical product standards in
the 1940s. It needs an urgent upgrade for information technology
standards, which are mostly ignored if not every developer has them
instantly anhd freely available online when needed. Much very useful
work by volunteer experts (who are not paid by the document fees!)
is prevented from being applied in the real world by the restricted
document distribution policies of ISO and its member bodies.

Markus

-- 
Markus G. Kuhn, Security Group, Computer Lab, Cambridge University, UK
email: mkuhn at acm.org,  home page: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>