ISO's argument is compelling but we see other standards organizations taking different approaches and more or less still finding success.
[1] http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode13.0.0/ [2] https://home.unicode.org/membership/why-join/
I learned a lot doing this project, and I would never have been able to do it without free access to the standard. So I think Tim is right to recognise the value open standards provide to hobbyist programmers.
ECMAScript is nowadays amusing because the ISO standard for it is literally a single page document… that normatively references the ECMA published document.
Though, I think that ISO can be fully funded by the national standards bodies on an annual basis just like OASIS is funder by companies and not charge for PDFs.
Unicode is a standard for encoding characters. ISO is an organisation that _creates_ standards for just about anything.
Unicode became a standard as a result of beating other competing standardisations. ISO declares that whatever they came up with is the standard, no competition required. Hence the effectiveness of the business model.