That sensitivity to costs of participation is not as important
to most of the SDOs on my list and, I would assume, on yours.
Instead, their norm is participation or membership fees that, in
many cases, I consider high enough to be barriers, requirements
for meeting attendance. If the minimum entry cost for
participation in SDO X --including membership fees and minimal
meeting attendance costs-- is $5K or $10K or more, then maybe
maintaining even a dedicated machine for dealing with their
documents is a reasonable marginal cost. But, for IETF
participation, it is not.
[YJS] This is the first cogent reason I have seen so far on this list
against Word. Of course, out suggesting did not mandate Word,
and specifically allows anyone not having a copy to continue using
ASCII or XML, and since PDF would be available as output (and
has a free viewer) all RFCs would be available for all to read.
The downside is that when a group is working on a document
in Word, anyone not having the SW would not be able to directly
contribute - but joint work is not really practical using any system
without tracking anyway.
Y(J)S
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