Werner LEMBERG wrote on 1999-01-23 22:42 UTC:
> Specialist members will have full access to the member areas of the
> Unicode web and ftp sites. They can participate freely in UTC
> meetings as non-voting members, and they will receive a discount at
> Unicode conferences. This new membership category is priced at
> just $600 per year.
>
> `Just $600'... This excludes many interested private persons,
> e.g. students, which do a lot of work in the Internet community.
I must agree. Ideally, there should not be any restricted "member areas"
of the Unicode web and ftp sites. Keeping things such as early
proposals, working drafts and meeting minutes from the public is always
counterproductive. I understand that Unicode Inc. needs some form of
funding, but an elegant solution should not exclude access to data for
students, Linux spare-time developers, and other enthusiasts who could
never seriously act as a funding source for the consortium, but who do
already offer their time and energy to work on Unicode conforming
implementations. If restricted access to data and all the bureaucratic
overhead involved with this is really unavoidable, then it would be nice
to have at least some form of (perhaps only informal) free Student
Specialist Membership.
Markus
-- Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>
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