On Mon, 14 Apr 2003, Guy Harris wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 14, 2003 at 11:51:52PM +1000, Ronnie Sahlberg wrote:
[snip]
> > as far as i remember from
> > my telco days, do charge a rather significant amount of money for access to
> > their standards, making it
> > quite difficult for volunteers to write implementations.
>
> ITU-T does charge a significant amount of money (I've certainly spent a
> fair bit of money buying them, although the worst was, as I remember, on
> the order of USD 100-USD 150 for a standard - others are cheaper), but
> I'd be willing to subsidize the purchase of those to some degree.
The larger problem is that you usually need a whole stack of documents to
do anything, and each one costs CHF 20-80.
> ETSI doesn't charge anything:
>
> http://www.etsi.org/getastandard/home.htm
>
> "ETSI Standards can be downloaded free of charge on an individual basis
> on the Publications Download Area"
Thanks for the pointer!
It's worth noting that some costly standards documents document standards
which are co-standards with those issued by organizations which publish
their version for free in electronic format. For example, a few ISO/IEC
standards are also ECMA standards and thus available from
http://www.ecma-international.org/ . (No, I don't recall *specific*
examples.)
--
Mark H. Wood, Lead System Programmer mwood@xxxxxxxxx
MS Windows *is* user-friendly, but only for certain values of "user".