ISO/IEC 10646 using UTF8

ISO 10686 is a standard for specifying characters used by human languages. It consist of a names and description of characters, their numeric value and how to encode them. The UNICODE standard is a related standard where the names, description and numberic values kept in sync with the ISO 10686 standard but with a slightly different set of encoding requirements.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Character_Set

The ISO 10686 specification is available as a zip file from http://standards.iso.org/ittf/PubliclyAvailableStandards/ under these terms:

The following standards are made freely available for standardization
purposes. They are protected by copyright and therefore and unless
otherwise specified, no part of these publications may be reproduced
or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, microfilm, scanning, reproduction in whole or
in part to another Internet site, without permission in writing from
ISO. Requests should be addressed to the ISO Central Secretariat.

The documents you are about to download are a single-user,
non-revisable Adobe Acrobat PDF file, to store on your personal
computer. You may print out and retain one printed copy of the PDF
file. This printed copy is fully protected by national and
international copyright laws, and may not be photocopied or reproduced
in any form. Under no circumstances may it be resold.

The UNICODE version is available from http://www.unicode.org/charts/ under these terms:

You may freely use these code charts for personal or internal business
uses only. You may not incorporate them either wholly or in part into
any product or publication, or otherwise distribute them without
express written permission from the Unicode Consortium. However, you
may provide links to these charts.

The fonts and font data used in production of these code charts may
NOT be extracted, or used in any other way in any product or
publication, without permission or license granted by the typeface
owner(s).

The Unicode Consortium is not liable for errors or omissions in this
file or the standard itself. Information on characters added to the
Unicode Standard since the publication of the most recent version of
the Unicode Standard, as well as on characters currently being
considered for addition to the Unicode Standard can be found on the
Unicode web site.

Free from vendor capture?

This standard basicly consist of a table of identifiers with associated numberic value, and each entry in the table is a stated fact that can't be copyrighted. It also consist of a well known mathematical method to represent the numeric value as a stream of octets. Neither of these parts can be captured by a single vendor, and no trade secret can be used to block the use of standard. It is thus immune to vendor capture.

It might become a problem in the future to get access to information about new entries added to the table of identifiers, but as soon as one such entry is used in public, it would be possible for anyone to know what was added.

Maintained by open not-for-profit organisation?

Specification freely available?

Royalty-free?

There are no royalties associated with the use of this standard.

No constraints on re-use?

Conclusion