Huzzah. Unlike, say, the folks who own and license the Dewey Decimal System, ISO has ruled out rumored plans to start charging for its widely-used country, currency, and language codes.
A key standards organization distanced itself from a controversial proposal to charge for commonly used country, language and currency codes, following an uproar over the potential fees.
The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) announced that it had no plans to start charging for the use of the codes, an idea that had riled other standards organizations including the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and Unicode.
Those standards groups, along with developers of software and markup languages, depend on the codes and have implemented them free of charge.
In a press release, ISO said the controversy had mischaracterized its plans and practices, but it did not say how. A representative for the organization was not available for comment.
Except to say, “What we have here is a failure to communicate.”