Because standards are not products. They should enable things, not to be used for profit. Profiteering from that hinders progress. It should be quite self explanatory.
Many standards are simply guidelines or arbitrary rules. Someone just makes it up. For e.g. i++ has a specific meaning according to a language standard. Or the width of a door should be 36" inches. That is something someone just made up. You can make up a standard yourself. Other kinds of standards have years of work behind them, like engineering standards for bridges, or food safety standards. Someone has to pay the people to do the work. There is nothing inherently free or non-free about them.
The other important thing here is being able to read the standard gets you nowhere. You have to implement the standard, and an independent third party has to verify that you have implemented them. Someone has to pay for all this work. It would be nice if this was tax payer supported, but if the government isn't going to pay for it, maybe you would like to setup an international fund to contribute? I'm sure they would love to make them free of charge.
>They should enable things, not to be used for profit. Profiteering from that hinders progress. It should be quite self explanatory.
I want to pay the people who work on the standards. Profits help with that. Ergo, profits help progress. QED :)
BTW, ISO standards have been for-pay for years. Please explain specifically how it has hindered progress. Some data would be nice. The burden of proof is on you, given the decades of counter-factual evidence.
Someone already pays for the work of making standards. And it's not ISO.
Someone has to pay for the work for implementing them too, but not for accessing the standard itself. Lot's of things were not free, because of someone trying to sit in the middle, where they shouldn't have.
