Perhaps it will be beneficial in the discussion to add examples of other orgs e.g. IETF, Unicode. Unicode spec is fully available[1] and their funding comes from a membership-model rather than a pay-model[2].
ISO's argument is compelling but we see other standards organizations taking different approaches and more or less still finding success.
Also ECMA (C# and JavaScr... er, ECMAScript) which provides standards at no cost vs ANSI (no notable language specs since C and Pascal) which charges a fee.
Last year I finished the school year early because of the coronavirus lockdown and had too much free time - so I wrote an interpreter for CLR bytecode (https://github.com/Leowbattle/clr_lite). The ECMA-335 standard contained everything I needed to know for that project: documentation of the EXE format, VM instructions, etc.
I learned a lot doing this project, and I would never have been able to do it without free access to the standard. So I think Tim is right to recognise the value open standards provide to hobbyist programmers.
ECMAScript is nowadays amusing because the ISO standard for it is literally a single page document… that normatively references the ECMA published document.
OASIS is good but there member orgs need to pay membership dues and do it every year. I think ISO encourages independent experts from public sector and academia to provide expert feedback without paying for membership.
Though, I think that ISO can be fully funded by the national standards bodies on an annual basis just like OASIS is funder by companies and not charge for PDFs.
I'm afraid that you are comparing apples and Walmart.
Unicode is a standard for encoding characters.
ISO is an organisation that _creates_ standards for just about anything.
Unicode became a standard as a result of beating other competing standardisations.
ISO declares that whatever they came up with is the standard, no competition required.
Hence the effectiveness of the business model.
ISO's argument is compelling but we see other standards organizations taking different approaches and more or less still finding success.
[1] http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode13.0.0/ [2] https://home.unicode.org/membership/why-join/