[LINK] Australian standards blocked from open access

[Marghanita da Cruz]

Michael Skeggs mike at bystander.net wrote:
> 2009/7/8 Tom Worthington <Tom.Worthington at tomw.net.au>
> 
>> I recommend that my colleagues in the ICT industry also
>> consider withdrawing support for SA processes, due to the detrimental
>> effect this closed process will have on the Australian ICT industry.
>>
>> I'm on board with Tom on this one. Charging hundreds of dollars for access
> to standards documentation is a strong disincentive to comply with
> standards. Tax the behaviour you wish to discourage.
<snip>

I don't think it is that simple. As I see it one of the problems is that Standards
Australia is confused about its role and relationship with SAI Global. I believe SA
has a role in convening diverse groups as it did for AS8015-2005 - which was
adopted as ISO/IEC 38500-2008.
<http://www.ramin.com.au/itgovernance/iso-iec-38500.html>

The issue about openness is being played out at the W3C right now,
with regard to the incorporation of the Ogg Theora Codec into the HTML 5
specification.The Ogg Theora Codec, is open source and has been incorporated 
into Firefox
which is also open source. However, incorporating open source into closed source
and vice versa is problematic. Theora was in, then dropped (at which point I
left the discussion) but it now looks like being back in again. see discussion here:
<http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2009Jul/0272.html>

More about ogg theora here:
<http://www.ramin.com.au/linux/web-video-formats.shtml>

With regard to opennes, I recently came across this:
> ISO3166-2 Region Names
> The codes for the representation of names of countries and their subdivisions have been extracted from ISO 3166-2 with permission from Standards Council of Canada, the Canadian Member Body of the International Organization for Standardization.
<http://geotags.com/iso3166/>

At present, there seems to be two ways to incorporate Geotags into HTML pages see:
<http://www.ramin.com.au/marg/how-to-geo-tag.shtml>

Marghanita
-- 
Marghanita da Cruz
http://www.ramin.com.au
Phone: (+61)0414 869202