Re[1]: standards

At 03:08 24/11/00 +0000, you wrote:

>now if ecma can do that for 39+ years, what is wrong with
>ansi, iso, ieee, etc? i think it just boils down to basic
>greed.

I think your comment boils down to basic ignorance of how standards are
funded and developed.

As someone earlier in this thread pointed out, the content of standards
documents is produced by committees formed from relevant industries & other
interested parties; their time, travel, expenses etc. are borne entirely by
their employers, not by the standards organizations themselves. For a
standard of any significant size and interest level, the cost of doing this
is very large indeed; taking the current 10 Gigabit/second Ethernet
development activity as an extreme example, you are talking about
attendances of 200+ (and counting) per meeting, 4 days per meeting, six
times a year, over 2-3 years - do the maths & that adds up to many millions
of $$ even before you take account of the work these guys do between meetings.

The standards organizations themselves are "not for profit" organizations;
they maintain administrative & editorial staff that are necessary in order
to edit/publish/distribute the final standards documents. The differences
you see between standards in terms of whether they are free or charged for
are a reflection of how the standards organization concerned is funded.
Some (ECMA and IETF, for example) are able to distribute their documents
for free because their funding structure allows it. Others (such as the
IEEE) currently are not able to do that, as the income from selling the
books is what pays for their standards-related admin/editorial staff.

So, even for standards that are currently charged for, the total cost of
developing, producing & distributing standards is not reflected in the
cover price, by a very long way, as the intellectual property in the
documents is effectively donated by the participants. In IEEE 802 (where
the LAN standards are developed), we are attempting to find ways of funding
the admin/editorial activity that will allow the IEEE to distribute LAN
standards free of charge. This may in the end boil down to increasing the
meeting fees so that the existing participants (yes, the ones whose orgs
are already paying for their time & expenses to do this stuff) carry the
cost of publication.

Maybe the only "basic greed" here is more related to people demanding for
free things that have caused others considerable time and expense.

Regards,
Tony