Very few programmers care about standards and even downloading drafts of them - despite all these forum/mailing lists arguments "what/which code is standard"( a tiny vocal minority), their market is likely some sort of enterprise bureaucrats that must have the Official(TM) Standard(TM) printed in triplicate to bully local programmers into following it "up to legal code". If the standards were free, i guess they're going to be a bit more popular, however thats too late to change programmer culture[1] which evolved without them - so standards organizations don't have much of an incentive to make them public domain. [1] Compiler manuals are what people using as standard, and standards eventually adopt compiler features.