There is a side note that really shocked me:
> Normally one would need to pay ISO to get a standards document.
What is the point of a standard that is not pulicly available ?
> Normally one would need to pay ISO to get a standards document.
What is the point of a standard that is not pulicly available ?
"Developing, publishing and maintaining ISO standards incurs a cost, and revenues from selling them helps ISO and its members to cover an important part of these costs. Charging for standards allows us to ensure that they are developed in an impartial environment and therefore meet the needs of all stakeholders for which the standard is relevant. This is essential if standards are to remain effective in the real world."
I don't think the PDF standard was developed in an impartial environment.
The above justification might apply to some of their standards but certainly not to PDF.
PDF was developed by Adobe. They make lots money selling PDF tools and licensing PDF software.
PDF didn't have to be a standard. It could be a proprietary format.
Adobe wanted the adoption of PDF so they made PDF a standards so that they can sell more PDF tools.
It didn't have to an ISO standard. Adobe could have released it as an open spec with some sort of permissive license.
Adobe wanted it to be ISO standard to piggy back on "respectability" of International Standards Organization, to buy the impression that it's an open standard.
But ISO makes money by selling standards so we ended up in this situation when the spec for "open" standard that Adobe wants to be adapted costs $100+ to buy.
I guess Adobe at some point figured out this is stupid and made the spec available for free.
I don't know if that's the explanation here (maybe there's good reasons for it?) but it's the first thing that came to mind.
Keep in mind that ISO traditionally dealt more with industrial standards; eg something like https://www.iso.org/standard/40447.html costs ~$180, but I doubt anyone who'd be attempting to compete in the "Apparatus for industrial gamma radiography" world would consider that expense as any more burdensome than buying office consumables.
Chop it down by a factor of 2-4, and the question still remains: is $250 significant compared to the amount of work you're going to have to do to be competitive in the PDF-document processing space?
(for quick hacks, reverse engineering is good enough. you only need the standard once you're processing enough client documents that you need to know all about the long tail of possible but unlikely constructs your code may encounter, after all)
ISO is the international standards organization. A software developer in Indonesia earns $500 per month. Half your salary for one document is indeed a lot.
How much is 500g emping for you all? From a swiss source it's $25. That might give us a rough idea of price differentials...
[This is all moot though, because the PDF standard is available gratis.]
I hear (even for those based in US) that location plays a huge part, but even so, I assume specialization also played a big part?
In a world where I can work almost as easily 12 time zones away as 2, I'm not sure why these huge continental disparities still exist, but they do.