Re: Accessing the WG2 document register

As far as I have have seen, you cannot withdraw the irrevocable licence you
gave to ISO when submitting the document. ISO requires that you give such
licence otherwise your document will be rejected. ISO hwoever does not take
the ownership (or authorship) and you keep the right to grant licences
yourself to other people (with possibly different licencing terms). ISO
just requires that the licence you grant will also expose all other
proprietary rights that you claim (including patents), and that you sign it
with your name (you take yourself the risks for the claims you make) and a
way to contact you in case of problems.

All you can do then is to instruct ISO that your past submission should no
longer be considerd as relevant in next discussions, but all past
discussions and decisions that would be based on your document will remain
valid and will borrow the terms of your licence which must be clearly
starting the terms of use and which will allow anyone to request a valid
licence (not necessarily a free licence, because you caould ask
"reasonnable" fees).

Unfortunately ISO does not define clearly what is the reasonnable fee you
can claim to those that will request a licence. ISO will sell its published
standard and will not give you back any dime when it will do that (but it
is a fact that fees requested by ISO to get a copy of its standards is not
adequate as they are really too much expensive for individual users or
small organizations and non-profits). This has a aocnsequence: ISO
standards can only be defined and used and by large organizations (and this
brings severe doubts about ISO claiming they are building "international
standards" for everyone.

Even governments in small countries cannot participate, everyone has to pay
the same expensive fees to ISO even if their use of the stadnard will not
generate (propertionaly) the same revenues (or savings) as those generated
by large organization or big governments if they use the standard (the fee
requested to them by ISO is ridiculously low, and ISO then is still lacking
money to finance its activities).

----
Personally I think that Unicode does a much better job to open its standard
to many more people by offering differnet levels of participations and
opening a large area open to every individual without paying considerable
fees. I consider that the only standard that defines the UCS is TUS, not
ISO/IEC 10646 (that is just a piece of junk, badly administered, and
inaccessible to most people).
If you want examples of really bad standards published by ISO, just
consider the MPEG related standards or standards related to "open"
documents. Really I don't trust ISO in those domains and most people prefer
what the W3C do. I just hope that ISO will withdraw its MPEG and open
document standards, to be replaced by those made by other standard bodies
(W3C, IETF, CEN, IEEE... For ITU, UPU, IATA, many of their standards are
also full of patent restrictions and published with very restrictive terms
and very expensive fees just to get a copy of a single document).
MPEG should be completely withdrawn too, replaced by really open encodings
(such as OGG). And frankly, the Linux community can also create their own
standard body (there will be an immediate market for that, notably in
mobile and embedded devices where Linux is present almost everywhere,
including in Android and significant parts of Apple iOS) and coordinate
with other foundations working in the same area of open standards.
It is the Linux/Unix world that really promoted and developed the UCS to
allow it to reach its current state (before that there were lots of
proprietary standards approved by ISO and incorrectly labeled
"international standards" even if most of them were incompatible with each
other).
I can even remember the time when Microsoft did not believe in the Internet
and wanted to create "The Microsoft Network" (it was withdrawn, including
the ISP service using MS protocols, replaced by MSN services based on the
Internet and IETF standards).
2015-06-10 14:33 GMT+02:00 William_J_G Overington <wjgo_10009_at_btinternet.com
>:
> As I am not on the Unicore list, just the public mailing list, I am only
> picking up bits of what is going on.
>
> However, I make the following observations.
>
> I followed the link to
> http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~pandey/
> and from there, having looked at some of the items on that page, to
> http://unicode.org/conference/bulldog.html
> where there are some very nice things said about you.
>
> > As I am considered an ineligible contributor by ISO, um, standards, I
> hereby withdraw all of my contributions to Unicode, and reflexively to ISO
> 10646. A list of the contributions that I withdraw is given at:
>
> > http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~pandey/
>
> > Whoever has the task of coordinating with ISO, is that you Michel?,
> please withdraw all of my contributions.
>
> The problem is that if you withdraw your contributions, then Unicode will
> not be as good as it otherwise would have been.
>
> May I ask you to reconsider please?
>
> You have made a very effective protest in that it has caused people to
> wonder what is going on.
>
> Whether your protest will have any effect on changing the rules is not yet
> known.
>
> Yet even if it has no effect at all on the rules, if you allow your
> contributions to stand there will be people who are not yet born who will
> benefit from your contributions.
>
> So, will you reconsider please?
>
> William Overington
>
> 10 June 2015
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> ----Original message----
> From : pandey_at_umich.edu
> Date : 10/06/2015 - 11:01 (GMTST)
> To : babelstone_at_gmail.com
> Cc : unicore_at_unicode.org, unicode_at_unicode.org
> Subject : Re: Accessing the WG2 document register
>
> Andrew,
>
> Thank you for this detailed investigation. It is truly informative.
>
> As I am considered an ineligible contributor by ISO, um, standards, I
> hereby withdraw all of my contributions to Unicode, and reflexively to ISO
> 10646. A list of the contributions that I withdraw is given at:
>
> http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~pandey/
>
> Whoever has the task of coordinating with ISO, is that you Michel?, please
> withdraw all of my contributions.
>
> All the best,
> Anshuman
>
>
>
>