UpCodes cofounder here, couldn't agree more. We're fighting the Law Publishers for free, ungated access to the law. They think they own the laws, it's insane.
I think your beef here is with legislatures, not publishers like NFPA.
It takes a lot of work to write and maintain these codes. NFPA, a private organization, gets money to do this by charging for the code.
Maybe legislatures should be paying NFPA to develop these things, rather than paying nothing for them and leaving NFPA to figure out a way to fund them. Then legislatures could buy a license for them, or demand that they be put into the public domain.
But it's not fair to blame NFPA for charging for these things after they fronted the significant effort to develop them.
A significant misconception is about who writes the codes. I haven't looked closely at NFPA's model, but many of the Law Publishers actually have outside volunteers write the codes - government officials, industry professionals and interested third parties.
Another misconception is around where their revenue comes from. ICC for example (who we know the best given their 2 lawsuits against us), makes 80.0% of their revenue from program services, including consulting, certification, and training, which do not rely on profiting by limiting access to the law (see their last 990). These non-profit organizations are extremely lucrative and pay their executives many times the median non-profit executive salaries.
Previous Hacker News thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19617073
We host a lot of laws based on the NFPA 70 BTW (see https://up.codes/codes/general). We take a ton of heat for hosting the law, it's messed up.