Re: How to pay $47 for a copy of RFC 793

[Florian Weimer <[e-mail]>]

* Bob Braden:

> Now, it has always been IETF's (and even before there was an IETF,
> Jon Postel's) policy to allow people to sell RFCs. What astonishes
> me is that clever people in the IEEE don't know RFCs are available
> free online. I guess RFCs remain so counter-cultural that industrial
> types don't get it. I wonder how many other IEEE standards contain
> similar RFC-for-pay references..

A lot of the stuff IEEE publishes for a fee is freely and legally
available from other sources (without the official IEEE imprint, of
course).  IEEE performs extensive search engine optimization (aka
Google spamming) to get their for-pay content rated over the free
content.  I suppose this is required because otherwise, library access
statistics would plummet and libraries would cancel their
subscriptions. *sigh*

(Same for ACM, Springer, and so one, of course.)