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Before the discussion degenerates into general capitalism critique as usual, it should be noted that copies of those ISO standards that aren't free to download

Before the discussion degenerates into general capitalism critique as usual, it should be noted that copies of those ISO standards that aren't free to download are "expensive" (though still in the range of obtaining a single academic fulltext paper for non-institutional use) because the authors of said standards have reserved special republishing rights for the material. In other words, the copies are expensive because the authors need to make money off their books published in parallel, with the book text also containing much needed commentary. At least it used to be like that years ago. If you want "free" standards, look what happened to so-called web standards dominated financially by FAANG, and the catastrophic results to the extant web. Might as well say the web as such doesn't exist anymore.

DropInIn 3y ago
Seems to me your saying the problem is that independents and corporations make the standards rather than governments and nonprofits...
layer8 3y ago
It’s usually not the actual authors who get the money from selling copies of the standards, it's the standards organizations, who finance part of their operations from it.
- tannhaeuser 3y ago
  As I said, the incentive for authors is thus to make the standard incomprehensible, hard to navigate, voluminous, ... and sell a book about it the profit of which goes to the author(s) and publisher. The authors and potential sponsors also negotiate the selling price of the standard or whether it can be downloaded for free, thus can inflate the price. That kind of deal is how experts in the field get even involved - otherwise what would the incentive be for an editor when the process of establishing consensus is extremely long (multiple years), tedious, and expensive.
  - layer8 3y ago
    At least in the fields I’m working in, the incentive is interoperability, and the authors are payed by the companies that are members of the standards organization, and/or are academics that are payed for consulting work. The incentives are really the same as for “open” standards like IETF, WhatWG, etc. The fact that standards are often difficult to parse is more a side-effect of compromise wording, non-English authors, and technical terseness, and that they effectively act more as a contract between the member companies, which already have the institutional knowledge to interpret the wording.

DropInIn 3y ago

Seems to me your saying the problem is that independents and corporations make the standards rather than governments and nonprofits...

layer8 3y ago

It’s usually not the actual authors who get the money from selling copies of the standards, it's the standards organizations, who finance part of their operations from it.

tannhaeuser 3y ago
As I said, the incentive for authors is thus to make the standard incomprehensible, hard to navigate, voluminous, ... and sell a book about it the profit of which goes to the author(s) and publisher. The authors and potential sponsors also negotiate the selling price of the standard or whether it can be downloaded for free, thus can inflate the price. That kind of deal is how experts in the field get even involved - otherwise what would the incentive be for an editor when the process of establishing consensus is extremely long (multiple years), tedious, and expensive.
- layer8 3y ago
  At least in the fields I’m working in, the incentive is interoperability, and the authors are payed by the companies that are members of the standards organization, and/or are academics that are payed for consulting work. The incentives are really the same as for “open” standards like IETF, WhatWG, etc. The fact that standards are often difficult to parse is more a side-effect of compromise wording, non-English authors, and technical terseness, and that they effectively act more as a contract between the member companies, which already have the institutional knowledge to interpret the wording.