From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,fe5641bca012dada X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-Thread: 10d93a,d084bd46f7dd1dfd,start X-Google-Attributes: gid10d93a,public From: Markus Kuhn Subject: Re: The pain with standards Date: 1998/04/08 Message-ID: <352B37DF.DE0CC8A@cl.cam.ac.uk>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 341998361 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <3528B9E0.6F0F@bipa162.bi.ehu.es> <3529047A.44EE08B8@cl.cam.ac.uk> <352A68E9.38B5BBAA@cl.cam.ac.uk> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Organization: Cambridge University, Computer Laboratory Mime-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada,comp.std.internat Date: 1998-04-08T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: 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: