[massysett]

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.

[scrollaway]

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).

[gigatexal]

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?

edit: was referring to scrollaway's comment