At 12:36 +0100 02.01.02, Pablo Saratxaga wrote: >> > I would be interested to learn about the published ISO 8859-11, do you >>have >> > an url ? >> >>http://www.iso.ch/iso/en/CatalogueDetailPage.CatalogueDetail?CSNUMBER=28263&ICS1 >>=35&ICS2=40&ICS3= >> where you can buy it for 56 CHF (no, they don't take euros there, yet).
>I'm a bit reluctant to pay just to learn that it is no more than tis-620 >under another name. >Access to that kind of information shouldn't be made on fee base; it is not >for the price in itself (I can pay it), but the idea behind; do you imagine >the Mendeleev table being available only for a fee ? So, why do standards cost money? Because the national standards organisations live by a.o. the sales incomes. This is what is called "market-governed", "a modernised public sector", etcetc in neo-conservative newspeak, and it is unfortunately quite fashionable at the moment, as political ideologies go. Personally, I disagree with the mainstream and agree with Pablo: Standards are information, and should be free, in principle. Moreover: standards are useless unless they are obeyed to, hence making standards less accessible (by high prices) flies in the face of the idea behind them. The problem is that even my own country, Norway, by accident one of the richest countries of the world, is cutting the funding to its standardisation bodies ( http://www.nts.no/ in this case), thereby making NTS even more dependent upon sales incomes than before. Given this situation at home I feel in no position to demand other organisations to cut incomes. (If we cannot afford it, how can we demand it of others?) So, feel free (pun unintended) to demand free standards, but combine it with a realistic plan for how to finance international standardisation work without the missing incomes. Here is one: Make ISO UN-financed (the easy part), and make the UN member countries realise that they should compensate the standardisation bodies for a sum corresponding to the missing incomes (the hard part). But until we are there, pay with a smile. Trond ------------------------------------------------------------------- Trond Trosterud t +47 7764 4763 Samisk institutt, Det humanistiske fakultet m +47 950 70140 N-9037 Universitetet i Tromsø, Noreg f +47 7764 4239 [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.hum.uit.no/a/trond/ ------------------------------------------------------------------- -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
