Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!webber From: webber@athos.rutgers.edu (Bob Webber) Newsgroups: comp.std.internat Subject: Re: copyright Message-ID: Date: 13 Feb 90 12:07:15 GMT References: <3109@paperboy.OSF.ORG> <10831@saturn.ADS.COM> Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J. Lines: 38 Actually the copyright issue for international standards should not be seen as one of people looking for a free lunch versus people looking to earn a living. It should instead be seen as a matter of technical people wanting adequate documentation when they buy a standard- compliant object. Here I sit on a workstation that claims to implement IEEE floating point arithmetic, Fortran77, will doubless soon have ANSI-C, runs Common Lisp, is probably POSIX-comformant, and comes with CORE and CGI implementations (as well as add on GKS and PHIGS options). There was a time when I could sit down to a UNIX box and read K&R on line as well spec/source for the rest of UNIX (except for dec's PDP-11 manuals, alas, which were only available in hardcopy). Now, with nearly 8 meg of man pages, I find myself quite often feeling like I had just gotten a Mac with a user's guide and a $100 of hardcopy heavily thumbed documentation off in someone's office down the hall (I hear they FINALLY are getting most of that online via hypercard). Would you accept a UNIX system without man pages? Then why a IEEE floating point processor, an ANSI C compiler, Common Lisp, an F77 compiler, a POSIX system, CORE, CGI, GKS, or PHIGS, without usable online documentation to grep and search? Do you expect it to be free? Of course not, but you do expect it to be a relatively minor portion of the system cost. Indeed, if the standards committees mandated user-level availability of their copyrighted documentation in order to be compliant and asked for a small fee for use of same to be collected by the vendor, wouldn't it work out even better than now when most people go to a library to look up a standard (or more likely just do what seems to work and hope they are ok) rather than go through the hassle of getting a personal copy? If someone brought out a computer system that documented online every aspect of itself, I wonder how many new de facto standards would suddenly sweep the landscape. How much is the growth of UNIX due to its original distribution in this manner? --- BOB (webber@athos.rutgers.edu ; rutgers!athos.rutgers.edu!webber)