Around here most companies just have subscriptions or get to them through university libraries. It is still annoying, I aggree. It is funnier once you realize that they completly rely on free work as well.

That said, standards are imo one of the greatest t achievements of humanity. And if you’ll ever be involved in that process, you’ll quickly see why this whole thing is expensive.

If you don’t want to pay that much, don’t curse at ISO, put pressure on your government to provide it for free. Imo well invested tax money.

My personal main problem is that companies sometimes infiltrate the process.

Yep. I use Gimp, digiKam and Darktable for literally decades now. I am utterly lost on Adobe software.

We have ISO standards. Fuck every single company that ignores those (Microsoft, Apple, …).

It was.

Lots of the money comes from the US and US companies. But as you said, it is open source.

Linux was awesome 15 years ago. They probably just had driver problems. Those used to be much worse.