ANSI membership fees. (was: Machine Readable ANSI C Std?)
williams at nrl-css.arpa
williams at nrl-css.arpa
Tue Apr 5 00:55:50 AEST 1988
From: williams at nrl-css.arpa
Cc: ralphw at ius3.ius.cs.cmu.edu (Ralph Hyre)
Another alternative
would be charging members for ANSI membership, but this might
discourage smaller companies from joining, (or encourage large
companies to stack the deck) and politicize the process even more.
If by "members" you mean members of ANSI committees, then we are
charged! Each member of X3J11 pays an annual fee (I think it went up
to $200.00 this year) to CBEMA, the Computer and Business Equipment
Manufacturer's Association, for membership on X3J11. This fee pays for
the overhead of creating the standard. ANSI gets its money from
selling the completed standard. This fee is a bigger burden on small
companies (or individuals; I payed my own way for the first 2 years I
was on X3J11) than it is on large. However, the fee is really nothing
compared to the travel costs and lost time. I did a very rough
calculation once of the cost of producing the C standard. I think
$10,000,000 is in the right ballpark. Don't get the idea, however,
that committee membership is really cheap for the the large companies. In
general, the large companies sponsor meetings, a non-trival expense, and
do our mailings, which are a great expense in time and money. Creating
a standard such as X3.159 is very expensive!
Under the current rules, large companies can't stack the deck, since any
given entity (company, government agency, individual) can have only
one representative and one alternate on any ANSI committee.
Volume-Number: Volume 13, Number 40
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