Ask HN: Why are ISO standards so expensive?

Many other standards organizations have figured out funding models that don't shut out hobbyists, the interested public, academics, and professionals with tangential (rather than direct, funded) interest. ISO has not. They are behind the times in this regard.

I've been part of a team developing C++ compilers and run-time libraries. We used the final draft, which (at least for C++) is freely available. I suspect anyone relying on the final text (were it to differ from the last public draft) would be disappointed to discover that pretty much no-one uses it.

It doesn't seem to me to be a terrible trade-off to say that ad-hoc use via public drafts is fine, but if you need to use the actual spec for whatever reason then you're probably being paid to abide by the spec and it makes sense to charge for it.

Where I strenuously object to non-public specifications is where they're referenced in (and required by) legislation: if ignorance of the law is no excuse, the law had better be freely available.

The fee is to pay for the ISO's operating costs of maintaining and distributing the standards. They do have a section of publicly available standards, if you're interested: https://standards.iso.org/ittf/PubliclyAvailableStandards/

Its also worth noting that you can basically find all of the standards in their draft forms for free. You need to be slightly careful about the revision numbers, but often the drafts are identical to the ISO ones. You really only need to pay for the draft if you want to be certified as in compliance or are an enterprise user. In which case the fee is paltry.

Usual parasite approach. Accessing standards should for sure be free for everyone.

there are torrents that have all the standards...

IEC standards are also expensive. However, there's a hack available. Denmark has incorporated many of the international IEC standards as national standards "by-value". They are also available at a much lower price than the IEC standards.

So if you buy the ~100 USD DS-60950-1, you'll find a Danish cover page followed by the otherwise 900 CHF IEC/EN-60950-1 (the International/Eurozone IT equipment electrical safety standard), which also happens to be harmonized with the ~2500 USD UL-60950-1 (The American IT equipment electrical safety standard).

Can think of 2 reasons why it is not free.

a. These are meant for a business to show off its compliance. A business means it is already making money. I am sure every company would be happy to pay that 100CHF to buy it for you , just like they can afford to buy a book, if they are thinking about ISO.

b. The ISO compliance is to be asserted by a 3rd party auditor. They are a member of the ISO community and/or have a copy of the standard with them.

I've often thought that if standards organizations were truly interested in encouraging the use of their standards, they would make them freely available and recover their operation costs some other way. Even worse than the standards orgs themselves is IHS which acts as an electronic library (gatekeeper troll) for these orgs. In theory they are providing a service of managing electronic copies of expensive standards so that a big company doesn't get into licensing/copyright violations, but really all they're doing is adding overhead on top of stuff which should be free in the first place.

At one point the orgs were covering printing and shipping costs, but with electronic downloads and PDFs, it's really crazy to charge $$$ for a standard, especially when it doesn't include updates.

A couple exception to this madness: US government stuff (e.g. Mil-Std) which by law is all copyright free and downloadable, and USB.org is surprisingly and pleasantly just available for download.

Wouldn't it be a good idea to have a site just like SciHub but only for ISO (and other) standards?

When you do buy an individual copy, it comes with your name printed in the footer of every page. I had a copy of one once (won't say which one) and I could not let my boss read it. For many topics, national standards (like NIST) are great. They are free too.

Edit: We went with individual purchases because the group license was way too expensive. Had we paid for that, then we could have shared the docs with upto X employees.

Very few programmers care about standards and even downloading drafts of them - despite all these forum/mailing lists arguments "what/which code is standard"( a tiny vocal minority), their market is likely some sort of enterprise bureaucrats that must have the Official(TM) Standard(TM) printed in triplicate to bully local programmers into following it "up to legal code". If the standards were free, i guess they're going to be a bit more popular, however thats too late to change programmer culture[1] which evolved without them - so standards organizations don't have much of an incentive to make them public domain. [1] Compiler manuals are what people using as standard, and standards eventually adopt compiler features.

Because ISO likes free money. In most cases ISO doesn't pay the authors and reviewers of standards, so instead of posting the document for free, it gets to indefinitely receive 100% of the profit from the work. It's a sweet deal for ISO, and a terrible deal for the rest of the world. ISO's paywall makes it very difficult to apply their standards. It's essentially an anti-standardization stance, not what you'd expect from a standards body. It's especially a problem because today's complex systems depend on millions of agreements that need to be standardized (not necessarily by ISO).

More generally: If a publisher charges money for a document, you should ask if the authors (or their employers) are getting paid a royalty on the profit. If the authors (or their employers) are getting paid a (decent) royalty, then that's a decent justification for the charge. If the authors/employers are not getting paid, then that looks suspiciously like an exploitative relationship. ISO is in the latter camp. Que bene?

I'll use ISO standards, and if my employer pays me I'll participate in an ISO process. But I strongly prefer working with standards organizations who have changed their processes to fit the 21st century. Today many people's expectation is that a standards body will make the standards freely available, since there's no excuse to do otherwise. ISO fails that test, and instead has a big paywall. The historical justification was to support a printing press, but that is completely unnecessary today (just post the PDF or HTML, that's all we need!). ISO will occasionally release standards freely (e.g., the Ada language specification and the Common Criteria were ISO standards that ISO agreed would be freely available even on initial ratification). But you have to work for it. Other standards-setting bodies, like the IETF, are typically wiser choices for developing standards.

I hope that someday ISO will change their policies. But as long as they're getting lots of free money, based primarily on work by people they don't pay, it's not clear why they would change.

Sometimes you can access standards from a library. Not sure how common that is for ISO but maybe look it up.

TBH I think IEEE is worse than ISO. After a fairly hefty yearly membership fee, they want you to pay for individual specs that other IEEE members created???

I needed to look at a 15+ year old IEEE spec, and thought "hey I'm a member, certainly I have access to it!". Nope. They wanted like $50 from a member. For a 15+ year old spec.

I let my membership lapse after that. Just couldn't figure out a way that it was worth $250+ year.

I know this question relates to the scandal of standards documents, but unlike the IETF it's possible to write ISO standards that are essentially proprietary by including various patent encumbrances, making them prohibitively expensive to implement. IEEE standards are particularly terrible in this regard.

Nominally to cover the costs of production. However, this is a convenient barrier to entry for Open Source and amateur developers that many companies who are standards participants don't object to.

I don't like the high prices either and wish these were available for free. At least the demand to have them for free is not unreasonable given that a large part of the work that goes in the standards is ultimately financed by tax money.

But to answer your question: Because the primary customers are organizations who are willing to pay. Individuals that are not affiliated with one of the paying organizations are not considered, unfortunately.

From a practical point of view it is not hard to get access. My experience is: As long as I was a student or an employee of a university the library provided me access and I was allowed to copy the standards as long as I needed them for my studies. When I left university I could still get a library card for the library and I could read the standards as long as I wanted but I wasn't allowed to copy them. Also every bigger company I worked for provided access. At least that's my experience.

Yeah ISO are de facto laws and the should be free

I view ISO standards as a tax on companies who are willing to stand by their product and processes. Modulo obvious caveats, if they can get certification/compliance/accreditation , the end user can have a modicum of confidence when dealing with the business. It lets you buy toys for your child with a peace of mind, or get into a car with ISO certified airbags, or buy network equipment for your server build, etc etc. Its trivial to point out flaws in any system, its not easy to propose something better that you can actually implement in the real world.

On one hand, I ran into this myself a couple of times (needed to spec some tolerances for shafts and holes; wanted to find laboratory glassware specs). Didn't end up getting them since it was a one-off query each time.

On the other, you have to admit that they do a much better job of making money for the value they provide, compared to e.g. compiler developers. (Just from a cold capitalistic viewpoint. I don't philosophically agree with not having a free way to get started with programming.)

Because it costs money to sustain the armies of talentless paper-pushers who work for these organisations.