williams@nrl-css.arpa (04/04/88)
From: williams@nrl-css.arpa Cc: ralphw@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