We have to make money somehow. I don't understand how people don't understand why this is the case. If you increase the cost of other things then organizations and people won't want to be part of the committees. A lot of the revenue comes from organizations purchasing the work.
ISO should be a division of the UN or something like that and get a steady budget to pay its staff. Not a regular private company that "has to make money somehow".
At the very least, ISO could make the cost to get a copy of a standard not some arbitrary 3-digit number of Swiss Francs, but let the committees themselves have a say in this.
In my opinion, for example, it would make perfect sense to make royalty-free specs (i.e. standards that only have Type-1 declarations) available online for free, while charging 4- or 5-digit numbers for patent encumbered specs (standards with Type-2 declarations) for which those who need access to those will have to pay 7- or 8-digit numbers in royalties anyway, so it's still an insignificant extra obstacle for them.
The goal of ISO should be to promote international standardization. Its current business model is instead creating financial obstacles to adopt international standards, as well as creating financial incentives to base implementations on outdated drafts and old versions, which defeats the purpose of having processes to amend, correct and extend standards.
Other standardization organizations like IETF, W3C, ITU are capable of "making money somehow" without having to put their standards behind a paywall.
Standards are a lot like laws, except you in theory voluntarily comply with them (though not always — there are plenty of cases where compliance to ISO standards is obligatory in one way or another). It would be insane if politicians would put the laws they write behind a paywall, for sale to lawyers at 118 Swiss Francs per article, with the argument that "judges need to make money somehow". If you expect people to respect the law, the least you can do is to let them actually see the law, for free. Why would it be any different for international standards?
Yep. This is part of the reason I think a world where ISO is more or less self-sustaining, rather than subsidized by/part of some other entity that would be really tempted to influence it, is probably a better world.
In any case, ISO WGs tend to publish final drafts openly. Purchasing the actual standard document is not something required if you are just experimenting or playing around (and if you’re not, you probably can spare some change to support the organization).
There always have been and will always be international politics at play in industry standards organizations, regardless of whether you make it part of the UN or not.
