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Free Standards Group becomes an ISO specification submitter
The Free Standards Group has announced that it has been recognized by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) as a "submitter of publicly available specifications" for Linux. This is the first step toward the FSG's goal of getting ISO certification for the Linux standards.
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Free Standards Group becomes an ISO specification submitter Posted Jan 28, 2004 15:41 UTC (Wed) by Dabuk (subscriber, #1507) [Link] If the Linux standards become ISO standards, does that mean they will become very expensive to obtain like the ISO C++ standard?
Free Standards Group becomes an ISO specification submitter Posted Jan 28, 2004 16:35 UTC (Wed) by ctg (subscriber, #3459) [Link] I thought the price of C and C++ had really dropped.... For web downloads at any rate.
ISO documents can be free, but submitters have to be smart and know to demand it Posted Jan 28, 2004 17:25 UTC (Wed) by dwheeler (guest, #1216) [Link] There are several ISO standards that are freely available for download. For example, the Ada95 standard and the Common Criteria (security evaluation) standard are both freely downloadable. But to have a freely-downloadable standard, the submitting organization must be smart enough to demand that ISO allow free redistribution.ISO prefers to take standards (usually written by unpaid volunteers), slap a cover on it, and make a fortune as the monopoly supplier of the specification (without paying royalties to any of the authors). However, increasingly people have gone elsewhere (such as the IETF and W3C) where the standards are freely posted on the web. Freely-posted standards, as you can guess, are more likely to be followed than standards that are so expensive that few can get them. While this isn't only reason that TCP/IP, HTTP, HTML, and XML are popular, it's part of the reason -- people are more likely to work together if they know everyone can easily share the results without roadblocks like the costs for standards. Even less expensive standards are more likely to be followed than expensive ones. It's easy to argue that the K&R book is the real standard for C -- not the ISO standard -- because the K&R book is on every C programmer's desk and the ISO document is not. ISO can't ignore this, so rather than become completely irrelevant, they've agreed to such demands in at least some cases. So, make sure the Free Standards Group knows that it's important that the specifications stay freely downloadable.
Free Standards Group becomes an ISO specification submitter Posted Jan 29, 2004 6:57 UTC (Thu) by cyeoh (subscriber, #7767) [Link] The Linux Standard Base specification will remain free.
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