Other (computing industry) standards bodies make their standards freely available–e.g. ECMA, W3C, OMG, The Open Group, IETF, etc. Given they can't make money from selling the standards documents, they need to find other funding sources. Many of them rely on corporate patrons who fund the standards process, and in exchange often get greater input into moulding the standard to meet their interests. The Open Group makes some of its money by selling trademark licenses and proprietary test suites.
ISO defends its own model by arguing that it produces greater independence from vendors, being less reliant on them for funding and thus making it easier for them to say "no" to them. One big difference is ISO is not an industry-specific standards body, it has standards for all kinds of things that have nothing to do with computers – screw threads, metallurgy, analytical chemistry, oil and gas pipelines, you name it. Possibly their defence makes more sense for some of those other industries than it does for ours.
If the major SQL players got together (major proprietary vendors and leading open source projects), they could create their own SQL standards process to supersede the ISO one, and release the standard freely. The ISO standard could still exist, but it could turn into one of these ISO standards where ISO just adopts the text of an existing standards organisation - e.g. the ECMAScript standard is developed by ECMA. Initially ISO republished ECMA's standards under their own number (ISO/IEC 16262), now instead they publish a 3 page standard which just incorporates ECMA's by reference (ISO/IEC 22275). They offer it for free download [0], but are also willing to sell you a copy if you are desperate to give them money. ISO's SQL standard could turn into the same thing – but, that would require the SQL community to decide to push for that, and I'm not sure any of the players feel sufficiently motivated to do it.
As noted by a post above SQL is not a composable language. That means new features can not be implemented as (standard and user-extendible) libraries. And that makes the standard more bloated with every new feature. The DB-vendors benefit from the situation because it gives them more customer lock-in because when the standard is bloated, not everybody is likely to be fully compliant with it, which causes customer-lock-in.
Somewhat ironically the standards-body also benefits from such bloat because that is the product they are selling. The bigger the standard the more money they can ask for it.
I’m astounded at the outrage at having to buy them. Producing standards takes time and labor. Editing them takes time and labor. So does posting them and maintaining them. So it’s no surprise that one way to pay for that time and labor is to charge money. I doubt anyone here complaining about buying standards works for free. That other standards-producers post their standards for free does not mean that charging for them is automatically an outrageous business model.
Finally, for the folks who need professional access to this document, such as RDBMS implementors or professional developers using an RDBMS, the price is a pittance. To anyone for whom the price is a problem - perhaps someone writing a free software application - the lack of access to the standard isn’t a problem, because what they really need is documentation on how their implementations work, and two superb implementations - PostgreSQL and SQLite - have voluminous documentation and they’re 100% free of charge.
I don’t think anyone is outraged at the idea that the standard authors should be remunerated.
The problem is that the standards have to be bought. They should be in the public domain. But someone can still be paying for it (eg a government, or an international organization funded by various public bodies).
This 100% sums up my point. If it's a standard then it should be freely available. Standards bodies or governments or whoever can pay for the work that goes into it but how is anyone supposed to study and learn from a standard and maybe even not come up with a new one when one already exists if everything is behind a paywall?
There is a serious cottage industry around standards (not just ISO). Selling the standards themselves is part of an overall architecture for selling "certification" of compliance with the standards and ancillary consulting and training services and, in some instances, selling standard-compliant solutions.
While obviously standards don't have virgin birth (some costs are involved) it does smack as rent extraction: By definition there is only one standard so you can't ask for competitive pressures to lower the price.
ISO defends its own model by arguing that it produces greater independence from vendors, being less reliant on them for funding and thus making it easier for them to say "no" to them. One big difference is ISO is not an industry-specific standards body, it has standards for all kinds of things that have nothing to do with computers – screw threads, metallurgy, analytical chemistry, oil and gas pipelines, you name it. Possibly their defence makes more sense for some of those other industries than it does for ours.
If the major SQL players got together (major proprietary vendors and leading open source projects), they could create their own SQL standards process to supersede the ISO one, and release the standard freely. The ISO standard could still exist, but it could turn into one of these ISO standards where ISO just adopts the text of an existing standards organisation - e.g. the ECMAScript standard is developed by ECMA. Initially ISO republished ECMA's standards under their own number (ISO/IEC 16262), now instead they publish a 3 page standard which just incorporates ECMA's by reference (ISO/IEC 22275). They offer it for free download [0], but are also willing to sell you a copy if you are desperate to give them money. ISO's SQL standard could turn into the same thing – but, that would require the SQL community to decide to push for that, and I'm not sure any of the players feel sufficiently motivated to do it.
[0] https://standards.iso.org/ittf/PubliclyAvailableStandards/in...