Standards, as you probably know, are produced largely by the effort of volunteers. Many of us who developed the C standard put in half a year of meeting time over a period of six years, not to mention a comparable investment in work between meetings. Throw in the cost of travel and lodging for two dozen meetings and you're looking at a serious investment in both time and money. (Multiply that by 50 or 60 active participants and you begin to appreciate the staggering cost of developing a programming language standard.)

For the privilege of doing all this grunt work, we pay an annual fee to CBEMA, the secretariat to the ANSI-authorized committee X3 that oversees our efforts. That fee has climbed over the years to a hefty $300 per year. Not outrageous for those of us whose companies pick up the tab, but noticeable. As an independent, I shelled out $650 last year for membership in X3J11 (C) and X3J16 (C++). The extra $50 encourages CBEMA to distribute documents for X3J11.

But now CBEMA has begun issuing a flurry of additional bills, retroactive to last year. The typical charge is an additional $300 per year for each X3 committee we participate in — ostensibly to cover the costs of our international activities. I've been asked to pay an additional $1,200 for a variety of reasons. I can look forward to an additional $1,850 in bills for 1993 before you even read these words. Needless to say, a number of us standards drones are more than a little upset.

I can't judge whether these additional fees are reasonable, by some metric. I do know that they were decided with no public debate and they were made retroactive for most of a year. That is not a good way to treat volunteers, techie or otherwise. The short term distraction is trifling compared to the loss of talent this can cause in the longer term. And it makes us all leery about what might happen next.

For my part, I am resigning a number of posts that I have long valued. I shall continue as Convenor of WG14 — I feel a responsibility for the stewardship of C for at least the near future. I plan to keep up with the X3 activities in C and C++. But I don't expect to travel quite as much or work quite as hard in the standards arena from now on. I hope that not too many others feel pinched enough to do likewise.

P.J. Plauger
pjp@plauger.com