aka - those who come here to read the BOFH stories.

What does a Standard require to become standard? Although reading the story and the comments, I'm not sure the ISO actually knows any more.

Wouldn't it be more fun if formats and Standards, were made to battle it out like the Betamax vs VHS and more recently the Blu-ray vs HD DVD (won surprisingly it seems by Blu-ray, I have a suspicion that the developers and makers were only interested in charging far far more for the hardware and then software than they would have got for the DVD equivalent).

So the crux of this message is. What is a standard. Could anyone create a standard no matter how theoretical, and erm, does copyright/licensing laws still apply to a file format that obtains the ISO "Standard" mark?

The icon, because now I truly know how little I know about software and hardware. Occasionally I value my ignorance, but on this matter I believe answers will help a great deal.