Standards - on the net or for sale?

[mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Michael Feldman)]

We had a recent thread on this group regarding various ISO standards
including the one for Ada 95. In sorting through some unread (paper!)
mail this morning, I discovered Communications of the ACM, Feb. 1995,
in which appears an excellent article on this subject by Roy Rada and
a co-author. They do not mention language standards specifically, but
point to all kinds of computing standards, some of which are put up on
the net and others of which are copyrighted for sale.

Both these writers have been very active in standards work; I know Roy 
has been a player in the ACM standards committee. The important point 
they make in their article is that inaccessibility and high price of
standards inhibits their active use, and this flies in the face of
all the zillions of hours of (mostly) volunteer work that goes into
making a good standard, in the hope that the standard will be used.

This article comes down very strongly on the side of free distribution
of standards, advocating that the various standards-making organizations
increase their membership fees to compensate for the (high) lost
income. The authors are particularly galled by IEEE's recently stated
intention to copyright _draft_ standards, so that even these would 
come under a "monopolistic" distribution.

The authors argue strongly for Internet distribution of standards -
in the Ada community we can rejoice in being "ahead of the curve"
(for once). Too bad this article didn't point that out. Oh well.

Anyway, this article makes good reading.

Mike Feldman