🚀 go-pugleaf

Actually the copyright issue for international standards should not be
seen as one of people looking for a free lunch versus people looking
to earn a living.  It should instead be seen as a matter of technical
people wanting adequate documentation when they buy a standard-
compliant object.  Here I sit on a workstation that claims to
implement IEEE floating point arithmetic, Fortran77, will doubless
soon have ANSI-C, runs Common Lisp, is probably POSIX-comformant, and
comes with CORE and CGI implementations (as well as add on GKS and
PHIGS options).  There was a time when I could sit down to a UNIX box
and read K&R on line as well spec/source for the rest of UNIX (except
for dec's PDP-11 manuals, alas, which were only available in
hardcopy).  Now, with nearly 8 meg of man pages, I find myself quite
often feeling like I had just gotten a Mac with a user's guide and a
$100 of hardcopy heavily thumbed documentation off in someone's office
down the hall (I hear they FINALLY are getting most of that online via
hypercard).

Would you accept a UNIX system without man pages?  Then why a IEEE
floating point processor, an ANSI C compiler, Common Lisp, an F77
compiler, a POSIX system, CORE, CGI, GKS, or PHIGS, without usable
online documentation to grep and search?  Do you expect it to be free?
Of course not, but you do expect it to be a relatively minor portion
of the system cost.  Indeed, if the standards committees mandated
user-level availability of their copyrighted documentation in order to
be compliant and asked for a small fee for use of same to be collected
by the vendor, wouldn't it work out even better than now when most
people go to a library to look up a standard (or more likely just do
what seems to work and hope they are ok) rather than go through the
hassle of getting a personal copy?

If someone brought out a computer system that documented online every
aspect of itself, I wonder how many new de facto standards would
suddenly sweep the landscape.  How much is the growth of UNIX due to
its original distribution in this manner?

--- BOB (webber@athos.rutgers.edu ; rutgers!athos.rutgers.edu!webber)