Re: Fwd: Registration of 6 charsets

[Antoine Leca <Antoine.Leca@renault.fr>]

Keld Jørn Simonsen wrote:
> 
> On Fri, Apr 07, 2000 at 07:02:11AM -0700, Mark Davis wrote:
> > You keep saying that the Unicode consortium is "closed", as if constant
> > repetition would make it so.

You are correct, it is not closed.

However, it is the closest to what I see as a lobby group.
BTW, national bodies are another example.


> I regard Unicode as quite closed, as it costs about USD 12.000 a year to
> have a say (voting rights) in the Consortium.

... and about EUR 600 for an individual to join (as a "specialist";
I disregard "individual" membership, as I do not see the benefit:
the free copy of the Unicode standard sells for less, as far as
I can say).
I do not know if restrictions apply to "specialist" membership, as
the list is quite short.

> Only big companies can do this. It also shows that only about 20 very
> big US companies have a voting rights in Unicode inc.

Too much of my surprise, figures are in fact lower: 1 UK company (Reuters),
1 German one (SAP), 1 Japanese one (JustSystem), 1 not-for-profit
US organisation and 15 US companies (assuming I did not guess wrong on the
few ones I do not know about): looks like a very low number to me...
While I was figuring that ISO was a very closed world indeed, it looks like
this is not an isolate case... Also, English-speaking companies seems to
have a heavy weight (no, I do not want to be the editor of an hypothetic
Catalan or French version, thanks! ;-))


Antoine Leca