I learned a lot doing this project, and I would never have been able to do it without free access to the standard. So I think Tim is right to recognise the value open standards provide to hobbyist programmers.
ECMAScript is nowadays amusing because the ISO standard for it is literally a single page document… that normatively references the ECMA published document.
Though, I think that ISO can be fully funded by the national standards bodies on an annual basis just like OASIS is funder by companies and not charge for PDFs.
Unicode is a standard for encoding characters. ISO is an organisation that _creates_ standards for just about anything.
Unicode became a standard as a result of beating other competing standardisations. ISO declares that whatever they came up with is the standard, no competition required. Hence the effectiveness of the business model.
ISO's argument is compelling but we see other standards organizations taking different approaches and more or less still finding success.
[1] http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode13.0.0/ [2] https://home.unicode.org/membership/why-join/