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it's clear this is a very serious problem for any standards organisation
if your role is to create standards to be used by everyone, so we can
talk to each other, then it's important that use of the standard is
free. i don't think it's unreasonable to charge nominally for a copy of
the standard to cover printing costs etc because much of the work in
creating and maintaining standards is done voluntarily and supported
primarily by the individuals and their employers, not the organisation
itself - it's just a bureaucratic umbrella.
now in the case of country codes we can care or not care about charging
to use them - if you have to pay to use them, then design your own for
your own software and ignore iso. a tower of babel, but then i can make
money building translation codes. there's already a bit of this anyway
(perhaps for this reason) - eg australia is country 61 to the phone
system and 93 to the edi system. the usa (and canada?) is 1 to the phone
system, but doesn't use an un/edifact code - it uses upc codes.
so we use different codes.
now imagine we tried to run electrical safety standards this way. you
have to pay a licence fee to wire to the electrical standard...... or
build aeroplanes... i think you get the idea
so while i don't think the iso policy will worry me much, on further
reflection i strongly agree that this is both bad policy and principle
rick
On Wed, 2003-09-24 at 01:55, Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote:
> That sounds good but is not realistic. Yes, we can just-in-time
> download codelists and initialize the dropdowns, but that incurs
> overhead and availability problems. Also, is a cache an illegal
> copy? Relationships built with code listed values also have to
> be tested. How many copies constitutes 'fair use' or 'fair dealing'
> (these aren't the same)?
>
> The other side of the coin in defense of ISO is how should they go
> about supporting their work? The problem of the commons is who
> pays the cost of maintaining the commons? Should the government
> members pay dues as is done by commercial consortia?
>
> We may be staring into the beginning of the process through which
> ISO creates or accepts a new role in the domain of standards
> developement and maintenance support. Anyone care to comment on
> what they think that role should be and how it would be supported?
>
> len
>
>
> From: Rick Marshall [mailto:rjm@zenucom.com]
>
> i think if you read the messages carefully this shouldn't really affect
> anyone
>
> the message seems to say that if you want include the codes in a
> commercial product you have to pay
>
> if you want to advise your customers about where they can download the
> codes for use, then noone pays
>
> a nuisance, but it would affect say oracle who wants to value add their
> product with the codes, but not me because i'll just show my clients how
> to download the codes.
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