Re: 2167A, 498, commercial and mil standards...

[dweller@Starbase.NeoSoft.COM (David Weller)]

In article <3h3277$6r3@felix.seas.gwu.edu>,
Michael Feldman <mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu> wrote:
>OK - let's bring it closer to home and talk about ANSI, IEEE, and ISO,
>which make lots of money to support their standards programs by 
>copyrighting and selling these. A copy of Fortran 90 (the standard, not
>a compiler) is around $200. The Ada 95 standard is still available
>electronically and (unless I mis-read the traffic on this subject)
>it took some negotiation to keep it there. Thinking of the Ada 95 
>standard as a microcosmic view of the whole free-electronic
>vs. expensive-paper situation will help to crystallize it in your minds.
>

There's a rather interesting article about it in this month's
Communications of the ACM.  I wish the authors had taken a bigger
hammer at these organizations.  IMHO, published standards should be
available at printing cost (or free if you print it yourself).  Of
course, both ANSI and the ISO disagree with me (then again, I'm
American, so I don't care about either :-)


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