Re: cooperation with ISO

On Tue, Mar 25, 2003 at 09:11:05AM -0800, Bev Corwin wrote:
> These are all very good reasons to counter ISO.  What other alternatives are there?

But they may be founded on misconceptions.

> Bev
> 
>   ----- Original Message ----- 
>   From: rudy BERRY 
>   To: [email protected] 
>   Sent: Monday, March 24, 2003 11:21 PM
>   Subject: Re: [forum] cooperation with ISO
> 
> 
> >Standardizing via ISO is imho a very bad idea.
> We looked into ISO in order to possibly define a document format for the 
> German Government but unfortunately we soon had to discover that ISO is 
> completely unusable for our purposes.
> Basically ISO makes the standards non-free in both senses (freedom and beer). 

Well, this is not the case for standards that has been available for
free (beer) before making it an ISO standard. One example is the 
POSIX standard, which is freely available. For X that standard has also
been freely available for a long time.

I am not sure what you mean
with the freedom issue, what are the problems with that?
An ISO standard is normally copyright ISO, but it could also
be copyright ISO and the X.org.

> In addition ISO is _very_ slow in updating their standards.

I do not believe it is so. Why do you say that? What would you expect?

An update to an ISO standard (an amendment) can go thru ISO in about a
year. ISO-8859-15 took 9 months (but that was very quick). Yes, some are
slower, but if you want it and have prepared for it, it does not need to
be slow. I have an example where I had to wait considerably for IEEE
procedures to syncronize with ISO.

> Taking part in ISO standardization is very time consuming and very expensive.

What are your expectations? International standardization is probably
more expensive than US-generated standards, (for the US people)
but then other people outside the USA get a chance to participate.

Best regards
Keld Simonsen