Machine readable version of ANSI draft

[John Gilmore]

In article <4350 at mit-eddie.MIT.EDU>, Barry Margolin writes:
> In article <1525 at hoptoad.uucp> gnu at hoptoad.uucp (John Gilmore) writes:
> >  But it appears that technology is not going to save us from
> >brain damaged policies in our standards bureacracy; I guess we'll have
> >to reform the bureacracies instead, which is a lot less fun than building
> >good technologies.
> 
> ANSI is basically a publishing house.  Do you know of any other major
> publishing house that would be in favor of you copying their books onto
> the net?  Why is this brain damage?

If ANSI is a publishing house, let's eliminate it and contract to
Prentice-Hall or Doubleday to publish our standards.  They do a better
printing job, bind their books well, and sell them for cheaper.  And
when they publish a book where machine readable copy makes sense,
they make machine readable available (e.g. P-H sells the Xinu tape).  I
wouldn't object to paying $65 to get a tape of the proposed ANSI C
standard, which is what the printed version costs.

The trouble is that ANSI makes the rules for how standards are created,
*in addition to* publishing them.  And they warp the rules, which warps
the standards, so they can make money.  And we get to live with the
resulting standards.  See my .signature below.
-- 
John Gilmore  {sun,ptsfa,lll-crg,ihnp4}!hoptoad!gnu   gnu at ingres.berkeley.edu
  I forsee a day when there are two kinds of C compilers: standard ones and 
  useful ones ... just like Pascal and Fortran.  Are we making progress yet?
	-- ASC:GUTHERY%slb-test.csnet