Seems like Hewlett-Packard was never for RAND in the first place, and MS is neither for nor against it. This is according to Bruce Perens.

My question is who wants this ?

Who would feel that charging people to use a STANDARD would be a good thing ? I don't think standards will be of a higher quality if developed as a "trade secret" before being released, but I don't think there is a danger to the open source community here.

Standards are most likely to be what people use, not what an organization says we should. Case in point, TCP/IP which was not the recomended standard at the time, and IIRC, neither was RSA (but I could be wrong on this one).

Tiago