RE: Anyone on this list patient with stupid questions?

[jonathan.w.smith@att.net]

A very wise person taught me, "It ain't the money (it's the money)."
> On Mon, 13 Jan 2003 jonathan.w.smith@att.net wrote:
> > > Since most of X.500 stuff is not freely available as LDAP is,
> > and a lot of documents refer to this X.500 stuff... I leave it to your
> > imagination.
> >
> > I was beginning to suspect this, i.e., LDAP is a holdover from the kontrol of
> > information and making money. If I wanted telephone directory assistance, I
> > would have to pay for it. If this information were freely available (and the
> > Internet is making this so), then why would I pay for it?
> 
> Well, it all comes down to funding models.  The IETF is funded in such a
> way that they don't have to control the distribution of their documents.
> Apparently ISO has to charge significant amounts for its documents in
> order to meet its operating budget.  I happen to think that IETF's way is
> much better if you want to see your standards actually implemented by lots
> of people, but ISO has different priorities and chose another route.
> 

> Some ISO standards documents are co-standards with documents from other
> organizations such as ITU-T and IEC.  Sometimes you can obtain essentially
> the same document for free from one of those other organizations even
> though ISO will charge for the instances that they publish.
> 
> It's maddening, I know.  There are hundreds of books out there which talk
> all around some particular set of standards but assume that you have the
> standards documents themselves if you want to know which bit means what.
> And ISO standards documents come in flocks, and you generally need most of
> the flock to make sense of any part thereof, and at SFR50,00 per document
> it's mighty hard to justify studying ISO standards unless you're gonna
> turn the information into million-dollar telephone switches or some such.
> 
> -- 
> Mark H. Wood, Lead System Programmer   mwood@IUPUI.Edu
> MS Windows *is* user-friendly, but only for certain values of "user".
>