Lately, as I have been swinging around various technologies I have been increasingly finding myself directed to various standards issued by the ISO. The latest ones (with reasons raging from curiosity to serious research) include ISO 8879, published in 1986 and specifying SGML the ancestor of HTML and XML, and ANSI/INCITS 319-1998 which specifies SmallTalk (this one I managed to find on the web in the form of its last draft). Now, maybe I am getting spoiled by the IETF, ECMA, and W3C, which release both their drafts and their final standards for free, but I find the prices that the ISO and ANSI charging are ridiculous.
In fact, I would argue that if you have to pay for a digital copy of the standard, then the whole point of standardization has been bypassed. Standardization allows anyone to pick up a copy of the standard and implement what it says with the expectation that it should work with other implementations (hey, that’s the theory; practice varies). Charging for paper copies is, of course, understandable and fair since it costs to put those together. When you charge for access to a standard, and especially when you charge a lot, it dramatically reduces the number of people able to attempt to implement it (slowing down the spread of standards-compliant versions of the technology). It also reduces the industry’s ability to check behavior and see if it matches the specification. Let us say, for example, that the World Wide Web Consortium charged ballpark $1,000 to have a copy of the XML 1.0 specification. I am using some XML parsing library and it does not behave as I expect. If the cost for the spec is $1,000, I cannot afford it. There are many companies who will refuse to afford it. After all, how valuable can that specification be? How can I check whether I am correct or if the parser is correct? I can’t.
Moreover, many of the people chairing these boards are professors or researchers in whatever technology they are working on. So their salaries are basically paid by someone else anyway. The rest of the costs of running the organization should be minimal. Both of these organizations are non-profits, ANSI being a private non-profit and the ISO being an NGO, so why charge for the standards? They are not supposed to be making a profit anyway (I, personally, think that non-profits and our entire tax structure are insane, but that is, again, another blog post), so why not disseminate the standards more widely?
This probably sounds like me deviating from my capitalist roots. It is not, really. That would be the case if I wanted some sort of governmental agency to handle standardizations (blasphemy!) or some sort of regulation enforcing the behavior I described above–but I believe nothing of the sort. The ANSI and ISO have every right in the world to try and make an industry out of technology standards, but I, as a consumer, have the right to try to refuse them. It all comes down to supply and demand and, I think, over the long haul the trend will go very much against the ISO and ANSI. I am sure some larger corporations are only too glad to whip out their wallets and pay up for these documents, but these are in the minority.
Over time, I am certain that ISO and ANSI will be forced to shift towards the policies of the IETF, ECMA, and W3C. For example, when Microsoft decided to publish a standard for C# and the .NET framework, they did not go to ISO and ANSI. Instead, they went to the ECMA. Most likely, this was done for reasons of time and expense, but this too is what differentiates the smaller organizations from the ISO and ANSI. The demand will continue to move in this direction, for more efficient standardization, cheaper standardization, and wider availability of said standards. Ultimately, all standards organizations have two bodies of clients: the standardizers and those who would read the standards. If no one publish specs through your organization, the rest does not matter. Similarly, if you publish specs that no one reads you will be irrelevant. It is ultimately in the best interests of both parties to have things quick, easy, and cheap. Let us say that Microsoft did not want their spec to be widely available. Why would they get it published at all? It would be easier to just use it for you dev teams and never let it see the light of day. With the advent of the world wide web, no one needs a standardization comittee to make their work widely available. A few minutes and a few dollars and it is up for the world to see. Largely, what these committees offer is prestige, but inaccessible prestige fails to serve either clientele.