From jwagener@amoco.com Mon Feb 6 05:28:56 1995 Received: from interlock.amoco.com by dkuug.dk with SMTP id AA17420 (5.65c8/IDA-1.4.4j for ); Mon, 6 Feb 1995 18:30:36 +0100 Received: by interlock.amoco.com id AA14725 (InterLock SMTP Gateway 3.0 for sc22wg5@dkuug.dk); Mon, 6 Feb 1995 11:29:26 -0600 Message-Id: <199502061729.AA14725@interlock.amoco.com> Received: by interlock.amoco.com (Protected-side Proxy Mail Agent-3); Mon, 6 Feb 1995 11:29:26 -0600 Received: by interlock.amoco.com (Protected-side Proxy Mail Agent-2); Mon, 6 Feb 1995 11:29:26 -0600 Received: by interlock.amoco.com (Protected-side Proxy Mail Agent-1); Mon, 6 Feb 1995 11:29:26 -0600 From: jwagener@amoco.com X-Openmail-Hops: 1 Date: Mon, 6 Feb 95 11:28:56 -0600 Subject: Standards: Free or Sold? To: sc22wg5@dkuug.dk X-Charset: ASCII X-Char-Esc: 29 Item Subject: Message text Apropos the exchange on the net last week, there is a four-page article in the Feb'95 CACM (which just crossed my desk this morning) with the subject title. To quote a couple of sentences from this article: "ISO, IEEE, and some other standards organizations are using the various copyright laws enforced by government to exploit a monopoly on the sale of some standards which, in some cases, were developed by volunteers who paid their own participating expenses." "Why should organizations such as ISO be allowed to sell standards that were developed for wide public dissemination by volunteers?" "Why should volunteers choose to develop standards for those organizations which then make money from the sale of the standards?" The article goes on to promote free distribution of standards via the Internet, and even (obliquely) suggests that the ACM "...lobby governments to coerce ISO to change its policy...". Something I found interesting, which I hadn't know before, is that "...GATT calls for all nations to use ISO standards...", which (in my mind, at least) should certainly raise the issue about the propriety of ISO (and ANSI) selling standards above distribution costs and restricting (free) distribution via the Internet. Jerry