• Reported by liorean

In an ISO meeting earlier this year, there was some discussion about introducing a fee on commercial usage of some ISO standards, including ISO 3166 (country codes), ISO 4217 (currency codes), and ISO 639 (language codes).

W3C recently sent a letter to ISO stating their concerns about the effects such a step would have on the internet at large and non-English websites in particular. Responding on the same proposal, The Unicode Technical Commitee takes the position that infrastucture related ISO standards must be free of charge.

Think of the consequences, if everyone using language codes in their webpages would have to pay for the usage of these codes!