Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sdd.hp.com!hplabs!pyramid!lstowell
From: lstowell@pyrnova.pyramid.com (Lon Stowell)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.iso
Subject: Re: ISO Whining
Message-ID: <143020@pyramid.pyramid.com>
Date: 31 Jan 91 03:48:03 GMT
Sender: daemon@pyramid.pyramid.com
Reply-To: lstowell@pyrnova.pyramid.com (Lon Stowell)
Organization: Pyramid Technology Corp., Mountain View, CA
Lines: 148

In article <ENAG.91Jan30204136@svarte.ifi.uio.no> enag@ifi.uio.no (Erik Naggum) writes:
>Lon,
>
>I think you're a little confused.
   
   Likely, but I don't think you read very carefully.
>
>When you speak of "the '88 standards", I believe you're referring to
>CCITT documents, not ISO documents.  CCITT docs are considerably
>cheaper than their ISO counterparts from the outset.  I've observed a
>factor of three as the norm, with peaks as high as a factor of 20.
>
   To be equally picky, CCITT produces only "Recommendations".
   I believe you missed my point,,,,there are many ISO documents
   which are based on CCITT ones....rather than including these,
   a cross-reference to the CCITT number is used.  

   There USED to be such a price differential here, and maybe
   that is why the mentioned books are cheaper than
   Omnicoms...perhaps they only publish the related CCITT and
   x-ref the ISO....I don't know why the price difference, just
   guessing.


>When you speak of "most of them except Internet RFC's", I'm not sure
>what you mean.  Internet RFC's are not "standards".  They are not
>published every four years, either, or yearly or any other fixed time
>interval.
>
    I am aware what the initials stand for.  Again you seem to
    have deliberately missed the point.  The Internet doc's are
    not included in the bookset I mentioned. Semantics on
    whether they are "standards" or "request for comments"
    aside, these are not typically included in commercial 
    publications here in the US, nor are they copyrighted
    by the same folks with delusions of pricing that control
    ISO.

>I'm quite certain it's "ANSI" with only one I, as opposed to one of
>the more ubiquitous standards known as ASCII.
   
    No useful information in this statement.  If you insist on
    using a spell-checker, please pipe it to /dev/null, not the
    net--thanking you in advance, etc.


>
>When you speak of ANSI "owning" the copyrights of all ITU standards in
>the U.S., I believe you intended to indicate a licensing agreement.
>Is this so?  Last I heard, Global Engineering had a license agreement
>with ITU, and ANSI is rumored to have given Global exclusive right to
>sell or duplicate their standards.
>
   In the US, the Congress actually controls all treaty type
   info.  My understanding is that the copyrights have been
   assigned to ANSI for the ISO docs...although I have recently
   seen mention of availability from the IEEE....if anyone has
   FACTS about this please contribute.

>You ask about other countries.  I hope Norway qualifies.  I've bought
>about two shelf-feet of CCITT's Blue Book and it's quite inexpensive.
>Only $500 a shelf-foot or something in the vicinity thereof.  I've
>also bought about three shelf-inches of ISO standards, and that
>totalled $2,000, so we're talking $4,000 a shelf-foot.  Some of the
>more perversely priced documents would extrapolate to $10,000 a
>shelf-foot, but that's unusual.  Most notably, the ISO ODA specs cost
>12 times more than the CCITT specs, and they are supposed to be
>"technically aligned".  There are things in the ISO ODA which are not
>in the CCITT ODA, but there are also issues of decency in pricing,
>here.
>
   Pricing in each country is set by the organization in that
   country which participates in the international body.  I
   don't see '88 CCITT's over here much cheaper than ISO's...but
   it looks like there MAY be some emerging price competition
   and it is IMHO, about time.  

>I've wanted to acquire the ISO documents for MOTIS, but CCITT X.400
>was available at 1/8 of the cost, so I bought that instead.  I also
>wanted to acquire the ISO X.25 specifications because of the higher
>quality of the description of several of the "sub-layers", but I've
>had to shelve that.  I bought SGML and its amendment and associated
>SDIF and registration stuff, and the TR (9573), and then I recently
>bought two copies of Goldfarb's {The SGML Handbook} shipped with DHL
>from London or maybe it was New York, never figured out, and both of
>these books cost much less than the above mentioned standards.  Note
>that this book _contains_ the ISO 8879 text, including amendment and
>suggested improvements.
>
>In my opinion, ISO's pricing policy is somewhere between insane and
>mentally warped.  Also, I hate Helvetica for regular text, but that's
>another of their wrong decisions, along with their insistance on two-
>column text.  CCITT goes for what looks like Times Roman and has full-
>page layout, and it's a lot easier to deal with.  I have one gripe
>with CCITT, though: They make a lot of typos and even though I get
>"corrigenda" sheets in the mail every four weeks or so, it's annoying.
>I have found ISO with their incessant Amendments are even worse to
>keep track of.  Finding out what section foo in the amended SGML said
>was a real pain in the butt.
>
   Fonts, etc. are set by the publisher....unless one is looking
   at the raw document copies...

>Here's one who would really appreciate electronic versions, and diffs
>each time they made changes.  Not only would it be possible to find
>out what the current version actually says, one could make hypertext
>links into this mass of mangled English prose.  (Goldfarb's SGML
>Handbook has made this possible, _on_paper_, and I'm really impressed.
>I wish more publishers would get the idea.)
>
   I would like electronic versions as well, but I bet that
   first there would be a CCITT Recommendation for the
   electronic format...  >:-)   I prefer MakerInterchangeFormat,
   but that's 'cause I hate the *roff formats.  Likewise would
   not like to see IBM/GML formatting.  Maybe that's why they
   are not available...other than the $$$ issues of
   reproduction, perhaps.

>From what I've seen, there's no danger of the U.S. losing its
>competitive position in ISO because of unfair pricing policies.
>
   IMHO (and not an official statement by any means) the US is
   not overly competitive in ISO, but it is not, IMHO, due to
   pricing.  Rather the widespread use of TCP/IP and the
   existing installed base is more likely the cause.   Remember
   the old saying that Creation only took 6 days, 'cause there
   was no install base to worry about..

>BTW, I'm not opposed to copyright on standards, restrictive dupli-
>cation policies or covering costs, it's just that with a little more
>sense of marketing these things, they could easily sell an order of
>magnitude more of them and make a lot of money in the process.  If ISO
>8859 was available in the bookstore, I'm sure several students over
>here would have had their own copy, for instance.
>
>The times when only manufacturers were interested in ISO standards are
>gone.  ISO doesn't seem to have noticed its recent popularity.

  Even in larger companies, generally only one or two copies of
  ISO doc's are available.  This keeps all but a few personnel
  from perusing them at leisure.  Also keeps one from
  high-lighting, margin noting, adding comments/corrections,
  etc....all the little things one does to enhance one's recall
  and understanding of otherwise BORING technical information.

  I really feel that this lack of ready access to the commercial
  crowd and the educational crowd is actually hurting roll-out
  of OSI...