On Saturday 13. June 2015 12.08.39 Scott Wilson wrote:
(The only thing I’d like to note is that its important not to confuse software freedom for users with financial costs for developers. Its easy to get exercised by having to pay €50 for a standards document, but if that standard can be implemented without encumbrance, and the implementation freely shared, modified and distributed by users then it better supports FOSS principles than a standard that is free to download, read and implement, but which incurs licensing costs or usage restrictions on users.)
What about whether the documentation can be shared freely? The case that comes to my mind is that of the SQL specification which, during the period I was most interested in it, could only be found online as some kind of ISO draft presumably leaked by Digital (if I remember correctly). It's pretty tough to work towards and to claim compliance with a specification if everyone has to obtain their own copy (by post from ISO) and then nod to each other in vague agreement. As we have seen elsewhere with things like Unix, if it means that everyone agrees on their own open standard or even on the behaviour of Free Software implementations, routing around the unavailability or impracticality of formal standards documentation, then this will happen instead.
Now, there was a time when standards organisations could probably justify being a gateway to documentation, having to provide editing staff and the logistics to manage the preparation of the document (Brooks' "The Mythical Man Month" goes into detail on the kind of thing that went on inside IBM, new and sizeable paper copies of manuals being prepared every week, and so on), but just as the academic publishers have been exposed as mere middle-men, with the real work being done by everybody else, so should traditional standards organisations in domains where they may not be adding any value be regarded with similar disdain.
Indeed, the emergence of alternative venues for standards, the lack of interest in getting technologies ISO-standardised, particularly with regard to Internet interoperability (remember ISO HTML?) where a more liberal culture of standard-setting has always existed, and the reputation-damaging Microsoft OOXML exercise have all contributed to a justifiable decline in the perceived relevance of ISO and the like.
It's also worth mentioning the role of vested interests in standards. Even with liberally-managed standards like Internet RFCs or in venues like the W3C, one can see in the texts of standards documents hints of the formalisation or legitimisation of existing product behaviour. Proprietary software vendors are rather experienced at "front-running" standards so that their competitors or future implementations have to catch up with legacy implementations.
Paul
P.S. I hope someone is distilling this discussion into a concise summary for convenient future reference.