The ISO C++ committee is comprised of several companies who use C++ enough to warrant sitting on the board to oversee the direction that the C++ ISO spec takes.
Herb Sutter is the convener of this committee. He’s written an article clearing up what the “open” in an open standard actually means. He explains that an open standard is one that’s designed by a committee of interested parties who pay to be on the board, rather than by a single party behind closed doors. He then explains why there are membership fees and why the spec, released in a PDF costs $30.
Nothing in the article is FUD, however, as soon as the comment start, the freetards attack. There’s a lot of arbitrary redefining of the term “open”, a lot of interchanging it with “free”, and so on.
Armchair freetards, who are obviously not developers, begin claiming that the cost presents a major barrier to entry to hobbiest developers. What they don’t seem to realize is that this is a language specification , not documentation! Just like you don’t need the HTML specification on hand to build a web page, you don’t need the ISO C++ specification on hand to write applications, unless you’re writing a C++ compiler.
Comments
Hey, this one’s mine!
Is it? Have I double posted?
Nah. What I meant to say was “This one should have been mine.”
I think that the guys over at Sutter’s Mill were genuinely taken aback by the Invasion of the Freedom Snatchers thing, though. Not a single snarky comment along the lines of “OK, write us a C++ compiler from scrtch and we’ll forgo the $30 bit…”
Not just a C++ compiler, but one that implements every portion of the spec. Pretty much none have.
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