Should standards be free?

There's one big difference between the IETF and other standards bodies: IETF standards are free while most other standards aren't. The standards that you need to pay for usually aren't very expensive. You might pay $100 or less for most of them, which is a very small cost relative to the other costs that engineering organizations incur. Despite this, the modest prices for standards seem to dramatically limit how widely they're adopted.

One of the IETF working groups that Voltage monitors but doesn't actively participate in received an email from a member of one of the standards bodies that charges for its documents. The email asked why the working group seemed to be reinventing that the other group had already standardized. Although nobody in the IETF working group seemed to be inclined to even look at the other standard, and the reason was almost certainly that they would have had to pay to see a copy of it.

So the IETF working group went ahead and reinvented the content of the non-free standard. They probably ended with up something that's close to the other standard, but totally incompatible with it. I'll never know if this is true or not. I'm certainly not going to spend $100 to find out, and few other people seem to be either. Standards seem to need to be free to useful.

Comments

[Mike]

Hey Luther - check out the following...it's somewhat related and interesting.

http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/01/free-the-facts-open-access.html