[pjmlp]

Like any ANSI/ISO committee, you need to be a member to seat on those meetings and discuss everything language related.

To become a member you need to pay for it, so most members are employees from compiler vendors.

Everyone else only gets access to what gets published as public information, hence the doubts due to not being present in those meetings.

[eru]

Thanks! (In my naive ways, I would have guessed that perhaps speaking rights were restricted, but that everyone was allowed to read and listen.)

The ANSI/ISO way seems like the opposite of what you'd want in a (open) programming language, doesn't it?

[Sharlin]

The C++ working group is one of the most open ones, though. All proposal papers, meeting minutes, even the draft standard documents are freely available at http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/, as are the archives of the various mailing lists.

(BTW, if anyone upvotes this, I'm going to lose my 1337 karma. Oh well.)

[pjmlp]

You get to know what is going on by posts from members, like this one

https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/blogs/5894415f-...

The ANSI/ISO way is the best way to standardize technology. The alternative being a reference implementation subject to a benevolent dictator with everyone discussing what the right license should be.

Any implementor knows what is supposed to be compliant with, as long as, its implementation follows a well defined standard, regardless of what license it decides to publish under and what type of implementation (compiler/interpreter/JIT/,...)

[eru]

Thanks for the link!

> The ANSI/ISO way is the best way to standardize technology. The alternative being a reference implementation subject to a benevolent dictator with everyone discussing what the right license should be.

That's a false dilemma. You can have a standard that's discussed and decided on in a forum that's not ANSI/ISO.

[roel_v]

That's just nitpicking. Maybe the GP could have said "The model of the ANSI/ISO way is the best way to standardize technology.", but the sentence after that described in a very apt way the vast majority of "standards" not build by a formal committee, with actual travel budgets and a commitment to make things work for the medium term (10 years, at a minimum).