The standards docs don't give you the reasoning behind decisions, that's all in the closed door meetings. And most of the time it's "because that's the way it is."
except in this case, given its title, the document almost certainly does exactly that: "ISO 497:1973, Guide to the choice of series of preferred numbers and of series containing more rounded values of preferred numbers" (mentioned in the answer on the post that was used to close the one HN links to).
The fact that ISO documents aren't just free PDF files with all rights past "viewing" locked down, charging businesses money for hard copies, is still one of the most blatant ways in which the ISO has held, and continues to hold back the world.
I'm not saying that standards shouldn't be freely viewable, but this isn't that big of a problem or unique to the ISO. There are hundreds of standards for manufacturing split across dozens of publishers and industry organizations (just for electronics you have JEDEC, IPC, ISO, and then 2-3 more depending on specific application domains).
If you're working in industry your company pays the pittance for membership as an organization then you pay the (relative) pittance for the doc and shove the PDF into your company's network store (unless they're jerks and lock it to a device).
Are you responding to something completely different? I was remarking on the "The standards docs don't give you the reasoning behind decisions" claim, which is almost always true, but in this case seems incorrect, given that there is a standards whose sole purpose is to give the reasoning behind the decisions.
