3 ms·

This offering isn't, as far as I know, anything new. AFAIK ISO is funded by their paywall and as an international treaty organisation is probably far harder to

This offering isn't, as far as I know, anything new. AFAIK ISO is funded by their paywall and as an international treaty organisation is probably far harder to reform than industry organisations, so I don't have much hope for this to change. ISO's attitude to this was recently expressed on Twitter: https://nitter.snopyta.org/MetaCatie/status/1368910356664483845#m https://nitter.snopyta.org/MetaCatie/status/1368910356664483... ISO even takes freely available standards from other organizations and paywalls them, even reneging on previous agreements to make a standard freely available, for example: https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/18/schematron_standard_paywall/ https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/18/schematron_standard_p...

tephra 5y ago
I'm not sure about the numbers but I would have thought that ISOs main funding comes from all the member nations who pay a bunch a money proportional to the countries GDP?
- Santosh83 5y ago
  So they're funded by dozens of nations yet charge a fee to access their so-called Public Standards? Operational costs cannot be covered by the member countries? After all, public standards benefit everyone, and is the raison d'etre for the ISO to be constituted in the first place. A corporate paywall makes sense, not from an org acting for the public.
- JyrkiAlakuijala 5y ago
  National standardization organisations participating in ISO usually make their budgets publicly available. Last time I looked I got an impression that the standards sales are contributing to their budgets (perhaps 1/3 or 1/4 of income). From the annual reports it was a bit unclear why the usual national standardization organization need to have wealth in $50M (instead of between 100'000 and a million) for being able to continue distributing standards.

3 ms·

This offering isn't, as far as I know, anything new. AFAIK ISO is funded by their paywall and as an international treaty organisation is probably far harder to

by hlandau 5y ago

tephra 5y ago
I'm not sure about the numbers but I would have thought that ISOs main funding comes from all the member nations who pay a bunch a money proportional to the countries GDP?
- Santosh83 5y ago
  So they're funded by dozens of nations yet charge a fee to access their so-called Public Standards? Operational costs cannot be covered by the member countries? After all, public standards benefit everyone, and is the raison d'etre for the ISO to be constituted in the first place. A corporate paywall makes sense, not from an org acting for the public.
- JyrkiAlakuijala 5y ago
  National standardization organisations participating in ISO usually make their budgets publicly available. Last time I looked I got an impression that the standards sales are contributing to their budgets (perhaps 1/3 or 1/4 of income). From the annual reports it was a bit unclear why the usual national standardization organization need to have wealth in $50M (instead of between 100'000 and a million) for being able to continue distributing standards.