> An ISO standard costs fraction of what the developer's time reading said standard costs.
Well, what if I'm tinkering in my spare time? I think if you want people to use a standard like this, you shouldn't charge for access to said standard.
Or you can, but stuff like this comes up. Seems petty to me. There are lots of people out there that don't have money for this, and I can't think of any positives around that.
Some time ago, I lost my job and subsequently cashed in my RRSPs. After moving to a tiny 80 year old farm house in the middle of nowhere, hooked up with 10 Mbps of broadband and a couple years of runway saved up.... I have all the time in the world. I don't have any money to spend on bits and bytes, however. If tomorrow I wake up wanting to do work related to ISO 8601 (say translating it to Klingon), I don't think I'd be easily able to. That's a problem, in my opinion...
Most hobbies cost money? Most sports clubs charge money and its not because they want motivated people to stay away .
> There are lots of people out there that don't have money for this
There are people out there who don't have the money for a PC, this group is far larger than any group that can't pay a hundred for the exact text of the standard. Clearly your anger should be directed at Microsoft, IBM, Apple, Google and GNU for not delivering the Freedom (TM) development environment everyone is owed.
Sorry, I didn't meant to come across as angry, I'm not. I'm just disillusioned with the constant nickle and dime'ing in this world. I get it, they need money, but in a better world, we wouldn't be charging hobbyist's for bits of standard data.
We can point fingers at other companies, or, if enough people agree with me, we can pressure them to be less greedy or we could start a new standard body that works for us.
There's lots of things we can do if it bothers us. Doing nothing, however, isn't interesting to me.
I might have overdone it in my response myself. At least some ISO standards have draft versions lying around that are freely accessible and close enough for most things. I think the Wikipedia article on it also cites draft versions. Most of the time you can find ways around having the finalized standard itself unless you want to go the extra mile.
From experience, every time I have needed an ISO Standard (even rare stuff like "ISO 15489-1:2016 Information and documentation — Records management — Part 1: Concepts and principles") I could always go to my client, ask them to pay for the bloody thing, so I can show then what needs to be done to be 'compliant'. I could alwasys spend the $150 (and charge them) but I always wanted THEM to retain the 'thing' when I walk away, because if I buy it, then I keep it (and no pirated copy for them!)
Any company can afford to pay for the ISOs. It's not for hobby (99% of the time).
Well, what if I'm tinkering in my spare time? I think if you want people to use a standard like this, you shouldn't charge for access to said standard.
Or you can, but stuff like this comes up. Seems petty to me. There are lots of people out there that don't have money for this, and I can't think of any positives around that.