

Why do I need to pay $360 to read the C11 standard? - Jun8
http://www.iso.org/iso/iso_catalogue/catalogue_tc/catalogue_detail.htm?csnumber=57853

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mrb
I remember being frustrated, as a student in the early 2000s, that the C99
standard was not freely available. I really wanted it, so after many hours and
days of searching, I eventually discovered that there were drafts, and that
they were freely available. That was good enough for me :)

Same thing for C11, the final draft, N1570 is freely available:
<http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/n1570.pdf>

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duncan_bayne
Herb Sutter goes in to a bit of detail about this here:

[http://herbsutter.com/2010/03/03/where-can-you-get-the-
iso-c...](http://herbsutter.com/2010/03/03/where-can-you-get-the-iso-c-
standard-and-what-does-open-standard-mean/)

I've actually emailed him, suggesting a Kickstarter-like crowdfunding model
for standard documents - the idea being that when the target is reached, ISO
gets the money and the standard docs are released into the wild.

~~~
Jun8
His "answer" is a total wimp-out, I think. Among the many points you can raise
(e.g. the fact that we already fund our national standard bodies with out
taxes) it doesn't explain the outrageous price ISO is asking for the standard.
I'm not against paying some amount, e.g. $20-$50 but $360 for a PDF sounds
Microsoftian in its greed.

~~~
Turing_Machine
I'd like to see an explanation of where, exactly, that money goes. The Sutter
piece indicates that the people who actually work on the standard are
volunteers, or nearly so.

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Jun8
So, there was a lot of discussion on HN taking on ACM, IEEE, and Elsevier for
creating paywalls, but how about ISO? Standards should be open source, free to
copy and distribute without making any changes.

