[RFC] Open Access to Standards Documents - LLVM Project - LLVM Discussion Forums

[RFC] Open Access to Standards Documents

LLVM Project

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AaronBallman

May 20, 2026, 12:13pm

tl;dr: ISO is seeking testimonials from “open source organizations” by June 4th on the importance of open access to ISO standards documents; this RFC is about that statement.

Background

Roughly speaking, under the usual ISO and IEC rules, all committee-related documents are only accessible to committee members or other members of their organization. There was an historical experiment run by JTC1, the committee within ISO which is responsible for technology-related standards, to open access to committee documents. This experiment was successful but was never finalized with ISO, so the documents were left freely available in practice but ISO had expected access to be closed off again. Fast forward about 30 years later: ISO realized there were far more documents with open access than they thought and so they’re trying to close off all access to those documents moving forward. JTC1 has been working to convince ISO and IEC about the importance of open access for several years now, and as part of that conversation, ISO is seeking testimonials from companies and open source organizations on the importance of open access to standards documents. The documents in question are: working drafts, committee drafts, and proposals (N-numbers documents, but also potentially P-numbered papers including things like issues lists and defect reports); other documents such as meeting minutes, agendas, and committee policies will become closed access and the final version of the standard will remain closed access as it is today.

Our community would likely have never existed were it not for open access to these documents and ISO closing access now poses a significant threat to our community’s future because standards like C, C++, and FORTRAN are the backbone of our implementation and of our 17k+ downstream forks. Our community members come from all over the world, are of all ages, come and go as they please, and we do not have the means by which to manage them as though they were employees of the LLVM Foundation so that we can continue to guarantee everyone has access to the same information necessary for implementing these standards. Further, this hinders our ability to meaningfully communicate with our users for things like the status of our implementation efforts which are tracked on a per-document basis for both features and defect reports, or for our users to validate our interpretation of the standard when there’s disagreement over a particular behavior.

Plan

I met with members of the LLVM Foundation this week to apprise them of the situation and they agree that the LLVM Foundation should make a statement on behalf of the community, but the statement they make should come from us. The rough plan for this is:

I have linked the draft the statement I think the community should make, just to give us a starting place;

The community can recommend edits on that draft statement up until May 27; I will update the statement as suggestions arrive;

The Project Council will meet out-of-band on May 28 to finalize the statement;

I will post the final draft to this thread in Discourse and submit it to the LLVM Foundation on May 29;

The LLVM Foundation will meet to ratify the document (potentially with edits) on Jun 2;

I will submit the final testimonial to ISO on Jun 3 (drop dead date of Jun 4).

Note that due to the limited time for feedback and editing with the Jun 4 deadline, there may not be time for lengthy discussions about the content or for iterations with the community if the Project Council or LLVM Foundation make edits to the statement. Hopefully those edits will be minimal (if any). It’s not ideal but ISO did set a tight deadline and we are appreciative of the community’s understanding.

Call to Action

The draft testimonial can be found here: Open Access to Standards Documents - Google Docs

Please leave comments and suggest edits. ISO has already received feedback about the impacts on standards committees themselves, so our feedback should be focused on the impact to our ability to support ISO standards. It is also worth keeping in mind that from ISO’s perspective, these documents were not supposed to be public, so reasoning along the lines of “we’ve always had access” won’t be as compelling as explanations of what tangible harms come from losing access.

Also, if you work for a company which has a downstream fork of the project or otherwise relies on open access to ISO documents, please advocate within your organization to make a similar testimonial . If your organization needs help submitting a testimonial, you can reach out to me directly for help.

As always, if you have questions, feel free to ask here and I’ll provide what information I can.

CC @project-council

14 Likes

vinniefalco

May 20, 2026, 12:38pm

Of course, there is...