Off-topic, but also the title of the first album of the progressive supergroup Transatlantic.
SMPTE Makes Its Standards Freely Accessible
11–20 of 109 posts
Re: SMPTE Makes Its Standards Freely Accessible
#12Re: SMPTE Makes Its Standards Freely Accessible
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think the benefits of charging for your work are mysterious. It's reasonable to believe that certain works should not be behind paywalls, but not understanding is kind of a confusing stance.
If your entire goal is to create a standard... it seems like giving anyone access to the materials needed to _adhere_ to said standard is prerequisite. Unless the goal is not to create standards, but instead to control access to said standard.
Both can be true. Promoting a standard isn’t free, and having licensing and certification fees, especially in an industry where such practices make a standardization org get taken more seriously, is a reasonable strategy. We’re lucky that our industry moved in a different direction!
Re: SMPTE Makes Its Standards Freely Accessible
#14What the heck is SMPTE?
Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers. The SMPTE standards have been very important for cinematography and television, especially for professional applications. Their importance has decreased since the transition to digital video, when many relevant standards have been issued by other organizations, but many SMPTE standards are still important, especially regarding the formats used for distributing digit…
But they are getting back in the game with SMPTE 2110 which is a standard that describes how to send digital media over an IP network.
Re: SMPTE Makes Its Standards Freely Accessible
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think the benefits of charging for your work are mysterious. It's reasonable to believe that certain works should not be behind paywalls, but not understanding is kind of a confusing stance.
If your entire goal is to create a standard... it seems like giving anyone access to the materials needed to _adhere_ to said standard is prerequisite. Unless the goal is not to create standards, but instead to control access to said standard.
The people requiring adherence to a specific standard are not the people who then need to pay to see what they're supposed to be adhering to :(.
Strictly, just because the standard costs money doesn't mean that the information within it is otherwise unavailable. The C++ spec is an amusing example of this: the actual spec costs $$$, but the final draft is freely available. I can't imagine they sell many copies. I know that back when I was employed to work on a C++ compiler I only had access to the draft.
If demonstrating conformance is important, I suspect that the cost of access to specifications is only going to be a small fraction of the cost of certification. And as I understand things, it's certification that's the target of charging for specifications.
Re: SMPTE Makes Its Standards Freely Accessible
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think the benefits of charging for your work are mysterious. It's reasonable to believe that certain works should not be behind paywalls, but not understanding is kind of a confusing stance.
If your entire goal is to create a standard... it seems like giving anyone access to the materials needed to _adhere_ to said standard is prerequisite. Unless the goal is not to create standards, but instead to control access to said standard.
In the world they operated in when this started was in a big corporate environment, gatekeeping was a feature. Anyone who needed a standard could already get it for free through their companies records department.
At my first corporate job the first thing I did was checkout and read all the MPEG standards.
But I agree, the whale we need to go after is IEEE.
Re: SMPTE Makes Its Standards Freely Accessible
#17I don't understand why any standards body would consider not doing this as a default.
I don't think the benefits of charging for your work are mysterious. It's reasonable to believe that certain works should not be behind paywalls, but not understanding is kind of a confusing stance.
There was a time when buying the Ansi C standard cost over $200 but you could get Herb Schildt’s “Annotated Ansi C Standard” for $20, which some said reflected the value he added to the process.
Re: SMPTE Makes Its Standards Freely Accessible
#18I don't understand why any standards body would consider not doing this as a default.
I don't think the benefits of charging for your work are mysterious. It's reasonable to believe that certain works should not be behind paywalls, but not understanding is kind of a confusing stance.
As someone working in standardization: I don't know any standardization organization where the people doing the actual work of writing standards are paid for their work. I certainly am not.
In the organizations I know - including ISO - the money is basically exclusively spent on "overhead".
Re: SMPTE Makes Its Standards Freely Accessible
#19What the heck is SMPTE?
Also the name of prog supergroup Transatlantic's first album, SMPT:E, a play on the band members names.
Re: SMPTE Makes Its Standards Freely Accessible
#20What the heck is SMPTE?
I thought it was the Transatlantic album (StoltMorsePortnoyTrewavas)