Honestly, I don't get why people are complaining. An ISO standard costs fraction of what the developer's time reading said standard costs. It's almost like complaining that electricity and laptops are not free.
I would much rather like to hear if the value that ISO produces is proportional to what they charge. Also, are the incentives properly aligned by charging a fee?
You're assuming every developer is part of the software industry. Not everybody gets paid to work on software.
I've contributed some code to ZBar. During my research I needed to read the QR code specification but the latest version was not publicly available. I certainly wasn't going to pay hundreds of dollars for some document just so I could contribute code to an open source project on my free time.
I think I managed to find an older version and studied that instead. I remember the standard didn't even contain the information I wanted to know, only vaguely-worded hints and footnotes. Can you imagine paying for this document only to find out the authors didn't even consider your use case? I found other resources on the internet and managed to cobble together enough understanding to solve my problem.
A document not containing all details necessary for an implementation is IMHO not a standard and should not be charged for. I'm looking forward to someone asking a refund from ISO for an incomplete standard. :)
But let's assume ISO would publish only high-quality standards. Wouldn't those be worth their salt?
While I do understand that paying for any document is an issue for hobbyist, let's be honest. Every hobby has costs. A good hobby gardener probably spends $100 on books alone. So, if the standard is good, and really teaches you something, I would buy it even for a hobby.
P.S. Funny that you contributed to ZBar. Our paths cross again. :)
The problem with charging for standards is the fact that people must implement them. Since we're all supposed to follow standards, they should be public documents like IETF RFCs. Charging money for these things effectively erects a massive barrier to entry.
P.S. Yes, I wrote some code to allow ZBar to decode binary data. The ISO standard contributed to my understanding of QR code encoding modes and text encoding metadata. Are you also a contributor?
In case anyone wants to know more about this stuff, I wrote about my research in a Stack Overflow answer:
But then: who pays for the infrstructure? For the people who does the administration of those standards?
It's not that the realtor takes no money for the apartment because you do the administration for standards.
Just take a closer look at the business model of the IETF. The IETF receives about $6 Million this year doing the administration from the ISOC. The ISOC members define what "standards" are becoming standards, or should I say "dictates".
Participation in the IETF is mostly free - you can join the mailing lists and discuss the drafts. What costs is going to the physical meetings: there’s an attendance fee, as well as costs for travel and accommodation, etc.
So, in effect, IETF standards are paid for by the employers of people who participate in the IETF, in terms of giving them time to do so and paying for them to go to the meetings.
There are reasonable conflict-of-interest rules for ISOC staff, who are required to be clear when they are speaking on behalf of ISOC or in a personal capacity. Although ISOC provides additional funding, they do not oversee the IETF standards process. That job is done by the working group chairs and by the IESG (aka the IETF area directors) who are nominated by people who attend IETF meetings.
> But let's assume ISO would publish only high-quality standards. Wouldn't those be worth their salt?
Paying ISO has nothing to do with creating or distributing the standards. The developers of the standards are, in all cases I know of, not paid by ISO.
I agree that there needs to be some money for infrastructure. It shouldn't cost very much for a PDF hosting service for publicly-available PDF.
The value of a standard is that it is universally used. ISO standards are only used by people who can afford to pay for them. The very act of charging for them reduces their value.
The requirement of standards adherence for government contracts can raise interesting questions around paid-for standards, too.
Also, the point of standards isn't "learning". The point is to agree on common definitions. It enables interop, that's it.
> An ISO standard costs fraction of what the developer's time reading said standard costs.
Well, what if I'm tinkering in my spare time? I think if you want people to use a standard like this, you shouldn't charge for access to said standard.
Or you can, but stuff like this comes up. Seems petty to me. There are lots of people out there that don't have money for this, and I can't think of any positives around that.
Some time ago, I lost my job and subsequently cashed in my RRSPs. After moving to a tiny 80 year old farm house in the middle of nowhere, hooked up with 10 Mbps of broadband and a couple years of runway saved up.... I have all the time in the world. I don't have any money to spend on bits and bytes, however. If tomorrow I wake up wanting to do work related to ISO 8601 (say translating it to Klingon), I don't think I'd be easily able to. That's a problem, in my opinion...
Most hobbies cost money? Most sports clubs charge money and its not because they want motivated people to stay away .
> There are lots of people out there that don't have money for this
There are people out there who don't have the money for a PC, this group is far larger than any group that can't pay a hundred for the exact text of the standard. Clearly your anger should be directed at Microsoft, IBM, Apple, Google and GNU for not delivering the Freedom (TM) development environment everyone is owed.
Sorry, I didn't meant to come across as angry, I'm not. I'm just disillusioned with the constant nickle and dime'ing in this world. I get it, they need money, but in a better world, we wouldn't be charging hobbyist's for bits of standard data.
We can point fingers at other companies, or, if enough people agree with me, we can pressure them to be less greedy or we could start a new standard body that works for us.
There's lots of things we can do if it bothers us. Doing nothing, however, isn't interesting to me.
I might have overdone it in my response myself. At least some ISO standards have draft versions lying around that are freely accessible and close enough for most things. I think the Wikipedia article on it also cites draft versions. Most of the time you can find ways around having the finalized standard itself unless you want to go the extra mile.
From experience, every time I have needed an ISO Standard (even rare stuff like "ISO 15489-1:2016 Information and documentation — Records management — Part 1: Concepts and principles") I could always go to my client, ask them to pay for the bloody thing, so I can show then what needs to be done to be 'compliant'. I could alwasys spend the $150 (and charge them) but I always wanted THEM to retain the 'thing' when I walk away, because if I buy it, then I keep it (and no pirated copy for them!)
Any company can afford to pay for the ISOs. It's not for hobby (99% of the time).
Yes, a software development company could easily afford the fee. This misses the point. When we talk about the cost of paywalling standards documents, that's not what we mean.
What about the paperwork and hassle of getting your employer to pay up? Even if the company could easily afford it, this is still a real barrier.
What about students, hobbyists, and FOSS volunteers? Why should they be barred from access to the documents?
> It's almost like complaining that electricity and laptops are not free.
That's completely disanalogous.
The ISO organization occasionally makes standards documents available free of charge, e.g. obsolete versions of the Ada programming language standard. Is that comparable to them handing out free laptops?
> I would much rather like to hear if the value that ISO produces is proportional to what they charge.
It's about the chilling effect, it's not about value for money.
> are the incentives properly aligned by charging a fee?
Of course not. As Tim Sweeney said, The value of standards is in their adoption. [0] When standards bodies are deliberately introducing obstacles to accessing their standards documents, the incentives are clearly not aligned.
A standards body should be incentivized to make the standards as widely adopted as possible. An obvious precondition of this is to make them as widely available as possible, yet ISO's MO is to block access to standards documents until payment is made.
Another problem is when laws reference such standards. It should not be permitted for laws to reference any document which is not in the public domain, but apparently that's not how things work; standard bodies are empowered to paywall part of a nation's laws. [1]
> Honestly, I don't get why people are complaining. An ISO standard costs fraction of what the developer's time reading said standard costs.
That'd be true if there was only one. But real-world systems often involve a vast number of standards (de facto and de jure).
> I would much rather like to hear if the value that ISO produces is proportional to what they charge.
ISO does not pay the developers of the standards it controls. It prints paper (which few want) or sends PDFs (which cost nearly nothing to store & send). It also manages votes, which today can be done cheaply. Many of ISO's current required costs are only required because they have to implement a paywall.
Don't get me wrong, I think standards have an important place in the world today. And I'd like to see ISO continue. But its antiquated approach involving charging for standards is impeding, not aiding, the use the standards.
I would much rather like to hear if the value that ISO produces is proportional to what they charge. Also, are the incentives properly aligned by charging a fee?