Why are there so many editions of an ISO standard?

A decade ago, World Standards Week proudly proclaimed "One World, One Standard, One Test!"  And yet today it seems like there's more editions of ISO standards that you can count!  How can so many countries and so many organizations publish the same ISO standard?

Actually, this is a procedural problem, made worse by the legacy of national standards bodies and others.  

1.  If a country or organization participates in the development of a standard, they can republish the information as a "national translation" and keep any revenue from the sales of that "translation."

2.  Some jurisdictions require the use of the adoption process in order to implement ISO standards.  So for Europe, an ISO standard may be adopted at the regional (EN) level.  However, EN standards are only published by the various countries in Europe as they are implemented in those places.  So now the European adoption needs to be adopted in each country.  Thus, a BS EN ISO copy (English), DIN EN ISO copy (German), an SS EN ISO copy (Swedish), an AFNOR EN ISO copy (French) and so on!  Yipes!

Here's my StandardsForum.com "Attack of the Clones" blog about this for more information:

http://standardsforum.com/attack-of-the-clones-why-are-there-so-many-versions-of-some-iso-standards/