ISO is full of vested interests that don't want hobbyists, the interested public, academics, and professionals to access the documents and be able to implement them at a lower cost.

This has always been my opinion. Plus, I've found them ripe with anti-patterns that contradict what they actual iso standards stand for.

Can you provide some examples?

I don't think $100 can really be considered a major roadblock to any technology professional capable of doing a standardized implementation...

In a world where there were only a few hundred standards, sure.

But today's complex computer systems depend on hundreds of thousands of interfaces, and those interfaces are depended on by millions of organizations. Their business model inhibits standardization, instead of aiding it.

> I don't think $100 can really be considered a major roadblock to any technology professional capable of doing a standardized implementation...

The problem is: the time when people learn most about programming is as students when they have too much time and hardly any money.

having a copy of a single ISO standard is virtually never gonna work. too many references.

Also it's way to much trouble to make the purchase departement buy them. If the standard is not on some local file server due to someone dowloading it from some russian site, it doesn't exist and I just reverse engineer the needed part of the standard from some application using it and guess alot.

$100 isn't a roadblock to a funded implementation effort, but that's not the only meaningful interaction a functioning society can or should have with a standard. $100 is a large roadblock to many other types of meaningful interaction.

"What they should be" is always an arguable position. We can only hold them accountable to their own charter.

Why on earth would you think that? I don't give one whit about their charter. Neither should you. In all likelihood, neither do they.

Because I'm not an idealist, and I don't want to be one. I'd like to think I'm a practical person who looks at what can be done realistically. It has worked out OK for me so far. YMMV.

There's no driver for XQD cards in Linux because of a $100 specification for example

Do you have examples of those standards organizations? The only other one that I have first hand experience with is ANSI and I know they charge for their standards. I have been dealing with X12 EDI and some of the standards for that are close to $1000 and that is for a single file format. The health care X12 standard has dozens of file format standards.

> Do you have examples of those standards organizations?

WHATWG, IETF, W3C. Not that each doesn't have other issues, but charging through the nose for standards isn't one of them.

Thanks. I'm not sure why I was blanking on IETF and W3C. I was not familiar with WHATWG.

ITU standards are usually available free of charge too.

Like W3C? “Standards” funded by Google’s ad monopoly? How is that going for them? The demand for everything to be “free” is destroying the idea of neutral standard. Standard must be funded somehow. The ISO model has worked for decades. The W3C model, where you don’t charge for either the standard or the products, has become a tire fire.

The W3C's failures pale in comparison to what I hear of the ISO MPEG process, in which companies compete to put as much of their patented technology in the codec standard as possible without any regard for coherence. ISO is worse than the W3C.

ISO at least still releases real standards with multiple implementations. Web standards by contrast have basically become a pretense, as the actual standard is defined by Google’s implementation.

I mean, to some degree that's true, but that's not anything the W3C can do anything about. It's just the nature of the browser market at this time.

As an example, C++, also an ISO standard, has notoriously few full implementations, and as a result C++ is largely defined by "what GCC/Clang accept" in practice.

It's even worse than that; the way you end up getting a license to these patented codecs (that are now part of the standard), you end up buying access to codec pools from groups like MPEG-LA. This isn't inherently bad, but the price of buying a license to these pools doesn't typically decrease, even when some (or most) of the patents in that pool expire.

Just because the standard is free does not mean that any single implementation is, you are free to charge for software implementing a standard just as you would be otherwise.

A proper standard needs to be free (both as in speech and beer), otherwise it needs investment to see that a implementation meets the standard (which in itself goes against the idea of having standards) or to modify it to propose improvements.

The work of developing standards can be done by people/companies who benefit from the standard, either financially or via other ways and those people/companies have their motivations to work on it.

I respectfully disagree. I’d much rather pay $50 for a browser, part of which goes to paying for the R&D and the standard, than have the status quo, where you have a de facto standard based on the implementations defined “by the companies who benefit from the standard.” Because that’s just turned into the ad tech industry dictating browser standards. I don’t think that’s healthy. It was way better when you had something like POSIX, which was defined by multiple competing vendors, where the R&D was paid for by license fees, than the “free” ecosystem where everything is bankrolled by ad money.

Open standards organizations in general and the W3C in particular were in full swing long before Google existed and will continue to do meaningful work long after Google's ad monopoly gets broken up or disrupted into irrelevance.

It takes a special kind of singlemindedness to look at modern web standards and the open source WebKit ecosystem, dismiss their wild, outsized success as a tire fire, and call for more corporate exclusivity as the solution.