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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

> Sure, it stings a bit to hand out a few thousand for pdfs but it isn't going to affect your business plan.

How will they even know what their business plan is without knowing what standard they will be providing?

Last time I checked in Australia, compliance with pay-for-access standards was required in many laws. It is outrageous, because it means you don't even know what you are legally required to do without paying some corporation money.

To add humour to the situation, I think that corporation got bought out by the Chinese at some point. Can't swear to that, I forget what is handled by SAI Global v. Standards Austarlia.

Anyhow the whole situation is a black stain on the idea of equal access to the law.

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> How will they even know what their business plan is

If you head into something like healthcare without any idea of what you need to do, you are begging for trouble. By the time you are buying any standards, you know which ones you need and how they fit in with everything else. Any real business plan will have researched this enough to get a ballpark. This is table stakes stuff.

You can research it all yourself in a few days and get a reasonable idea. If your team is all inexperienced you should probably spend a few consulting hours on guidance.

If you have anything like a real plan for a company, this is peanuts. If you don't, you do not need any of this stuff yet.

There’s a difference b/w how things are and how things should be. The former doesn’t excuse away the latter.

I think that everything a law sets forth should be publicly accessible. No law or reference in law should be paywalled. There might be a small fee involved, but it should only exist to cover administrative costs of distributing the information.

> but it should only exist to cover administrative costs of distributing the information

and that is what created the current situation.

> There might be a small fee involved, but it should only exist to cover administrative costs of distributing the information.

Laws should be freely (as in free beer) available. Laws should not be tucked away behind a paywall or behind "case law" or behind "international standards" that the layperson can't access without a fee. No fees. That's what taxes are for.

> How will they even know what their business plan is without knowing what standard they will be providing?

Are there no drafts available for most standards? For C++ the draft is often as good as the standard, and anybody can access the drafts. Is there nothing similar in other areas?

They exist and it is possible to get them, but I have never done so in a way I could find through a search engine.

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