Speaking as someone who is on an ISO committee, this topic of discussion comes up every couple years.
The bottom line is that there are and will always be costs associated with a running an organization, regardless of whether they are for or non profit. There are overhead costs associated with running a website, conferences, technical review, or collaboration tooling for example. While some revenue comes from participants and membership fees, not everything gets covered. The organization does a lot for the public good and it's unacceptable to criticize these passionate engineers that have dedicated their careers to ensuring proper standards globally.
Tell that to the IETF, who publishes thousands of standards for free, standards that made your comment on this forum possible.
Open standards. Open research. Open code. This is how we progress as a society. Rent seeking organizations like ISO can rot in the dirt for all I care.
Sorry, but you're only kidding yourself if you think you can even compare an RFC with an ISO publication. There's rigor, formality, lawyers, technical writers, and many others involved. RFC is exactly what it sounds like and what was originally intended for: "Request For Comments". There's no conference or central body (at least to the degree that there is for ISO) and it's mostly done in an ad-hoc manner. Nothing against IETF or RFCs, but you're really comparing apples and oranges. I've been coauthor on two RFCs and it is nothing like an ISO committee.
Do you mean the same IETF who standardize a technology covered by Cisco patents ? These guys are a joke... Heck, there is even a song about it... https://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html#35
Surely making a standards organization entirely dependent on subsidies by forbidding it from selling literally the results of its work in a free economy isn’t going to backfire in any way…
We have to make money somehow. I don't understand how people don't understand why this is the case. If you increase the cost of other things then organizations and people won't want to be part of the committees. A lot of the revenue comes from organizations purchasing the work.
ISO should be a division of the UN or something like that and get a steady budget to pay its staff. Not a regular private company that "has to make money somehow".
At the very least, ISO could make the cost to get a copy of a standard not some arbitrary 3-digit number of Swiss Francs, but let the committees themselves have a say in this.
In my opinion, for example, it would make perfect sense to make royalty-free specs (i.e. standards that only have Type-1 declarations) available online for free, while charging 4- or 5-digit numbers for patent encumbered specs (standards with Type-2 declarations) for which those who need access to those will have to pay 7- or 8-digit numbers in royalties anyway, so it's still an insignificant extra obstacle for them.
The goal of ISO should be to promote international standardization. Its current business model is instead creating financial obstacles to adopt international standards, as well as creating financial incentives to base implementations on outdated drafts and old versions, which defeats the purpose of having processes to amend, correct and extend standards.
Other standardization organizations like IETF, W3C, ITU are capable of "making money somehow" without having to put their standards behind a paywall.
Standards are a lot like laws, except you in theory voluntarily comply with them (though not always — there are plenty of cases where compliance to ISO standards is obligatory in one way or another). It would be insane if politicians would put the laws they write behind a paywall, for sale to lawyers at 118 Swiss Francs per article, with the argument that "judges need to make money somehow". If you expect people to respect the law, the least you can do is to let them actually see the law, for free. Why would it be any different for international standards?
Yep. This is part of the reason I think a world where ISO is more or less self-sustaining, rather than subsidized by/part of some other entity that would be really tempted to influence it, is probably a better world.
In any case, ISO WGs tend to publish final drafts openly. Purchasing the actual standard document is not something required if you are just experimenting or playing around (and if you’re not, you probably can spare some change to support the organization).
There always have been and will always be international politics at play in industry standards organizations, regardless of whether you make it part of the UN or not.
> it's unacceptable to criticize these passionate engineers
Sorry AN_ISO_Dude, but whatever merit someone/group has doesn't exempt them from valid criticism.
Show us the receipts, and how these standards couldn't exist without paywalls and I (we) would be a lot more sympathetic - the argument here is purely qualitative.
I know a whole bunch of people who are on an ISO committee, and not a single one of them is happy that their hard work will be locked behind a paywall.
Most (if not all) people on the committees don't like the paywall. The accountants have to explain every couple years why its necessary. Then people seem to forget and we have to do it all over again. It's cyclical.
But other standards organisations do just fine providing free standards, including fairly large and complex standards, so it doesn't seem particularly necessary at all. Hell, some ISO standards are freely available, presumably because standards that don't get implemented due to lack of access are kind of useless.
The bottom line is that there are and will always be costs associated with a running an organization, regardless of whether they are for or non profit. There are overhead costs associated with running a website, conferences, technical review, or collaboration tooling for example. While some revenue comes from participants and membership fees, not everything gets covered. The organization does a lot for the public good and it's unacceptable to criticize these passionate engineers that have dedicated their careers to ensuring proper standards globally.