This would all make sense if you were in favor of fat governments, but that does not seem to be the case either.
The entitlement baffles me. Or am I accidentally combining opinions of different people and making a misjudgment?
And we know the standards committee would be willing to work for free or people are available who would do the work (indeed, we can probably recover the standard from the postgres docs since they mention the things that aren't standards compliant - https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/features.html). The postgres maintainers do notably more work than the standards committee for free. How hard is it for them and Dr Hipp to throw out a document saying where the common ground is? It is far less work than they've already put in to the free docs. The useful parts SQL standard is an appendix compared to https://www.sqlite.org/docs.html
At least, I assume. As previously mentioned, I've never read the standard and as far as I can tell nobody is allowed to link it for me.
EDIT I feel like I should link some standard here, so in lieu of the SQL standard which I can't link, here is the TCP standard: https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc9293.html
In the case of a standards body, the people that do the work can get paid in various ways. The finished product can be published "for free".
In some research contexts this could very much be expected. If researchers were paid through tax-funded grants, for instance, the results of the research should be available to those tax payers. If they are also available to non-taxpayers, perhaps there is some altruism at play.
It's not an absolute given. But it's not an unreasonable expectation.