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Date:         Mon, 9 Nov 1998 16:16:05 +0100
From: Hans Aberg <haberg@MATEMATIK.SU.SE>
Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project
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To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L
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Subject:      ISO LaTeX
Status: R

The idea of an ISO LaTeX is in fact not very good because the standard must
be charged to pay for the salaries of the ISO bureaucrats. It means that
the standard cannot be put up on URL's for example. The result is that
people do not buy it, and so the next version will not be as good as if it
could have been otherwise.

  This is a discussion that pops up from time to time in newsgroups such as
comp.std.c and comp.std.c++: The fellows working on developing these
standards want them to be free, so that as many as possible can read them,
but ISO insists on this charge. People that have been working for a long
time on developing such standards are generally very unhappy with the
situation: It is reasonable to charge for standards which only a few
engineers on wealthy companies need to read, but for standards of more
general use it is a poor idea.

  Hans Aberg
                  * Email: Hans Aberg <mailto:haberg@member.ams.org>
                  * Home Page: <http://www.matematik.su.se/~haberg/>
                  * AMS member listing: <http://www.ams.org/cml/>