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 no

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] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26390040 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26390040 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26390279 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26390279