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SMPTE Makes Its Standards Freely Accessible

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Re: SMPTE Makes Its Standards Freely Accessible

#21

Post by jjmarr »

seanhunter wrote: post #17
happytoexplain wrote: post #4

Earlier 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.

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.

Buying the ANSI C standard still costs about $300. Same for C++.

https://webstore.ansi.org/standards/iso/isoiec98992024?sourc...

Nobody does it. gcc/clang implement it from the "drafts", which are published online due to the need to discuss them prior to standardization.

Re: SMPTE Makes Its Standards Freely Accessible

#22

Post by gwerbin »

lars_francke wrote: post #18
happytoexplain wrote: post #4

Earlier 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.

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".

Is "overhead" a euphemism for administrator salaries?

Re: SMPTE Makes Its Standards Freely Accessible

#23

Post by duped »

geerlingguy wrote: post #7
happytoexplain wrote: post #4

Earlier 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.

I think people have a flipped understanding of how these standards come to be.

They don't gather industry experts in a conference room and whiteboard out a perfect design that everyone agrees on and then go off to build products.

What happens is that companies develop products and services, and at some point it becomes more useful for those products to inter operate and protocols/interfaces between them need to be agreed upon. Oftentimes it's the mutant bastard children of the existing approaches by multiple stakeholders, encumbered by patents and legacy.

Adherence to a standard is not the goal, defining interoperability between existing systems is. And everyone participating is already a paying member of SMPTE.

Re: SMPTE Makes Its Standards Freely Accessible

#24

Post by lars_francke »

gwerbin wrote: post #22
lars_francke wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Is "overhead" a euphemism for administrator salaries?

Partially. Yes. Look at the budgets of these orgs and you'll see what I mean.

I use the term similar to who it's used for non-profit. The orgs I'm involved with are almost exclusively not involved in the actual standards creation.

If the secretariats were to shut down tomorrow I'd say the actual work on the standards could continue without anyone noticing.

There is a reason that at least the EU is considering modernizing the system. https://single-market-economy.ec.europa.eu/consultations/pub...

ISO, CEN, CENELEC, ETSI are stuck very much in the past.

So yes. Overhead.

Re: SMPTE Makes Its Standards Freely Accessible

#25

Post by PaulHoule »

happytoexplain wrote: post #4
geerlingguy wrote: post #2

I 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.

Well, for ISO it is a business model. And for a lot of standards which have limited interest in a certain industry and you are probably going to spend $2000 on gear to make measurements compatible with the standard it is not so bad to spend 133 CHF on something.

On the other hand I served on a committee and wrote a technical report that costs 133 CHF and personally I'm a bit annoyed that (1) I can't send you a link to read it for free and (2) a friend of mine who worked for the US government and is the only person I ever met who knew how to do complex modelling in OWL couldn't contribute her writing to it because everything US government employees write is supposed to be public domain.

Re: SMPTE Makes Its Standards Freely Accessible

#26

Post by wowczarek »

thx67 wrote: post #16
geerlingguy wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> the whale we need to go after is IEEE.

I wholeheartedly second this. I'm an individual member and a member of a specific IEEE society that sponsors a specific standard and I still have to pay for a copy. In contrast, the same standard has been adapted for specific industries and there are IEC, ITU and a SMPTE specs adopting it and those I can get for free. Doubly irritating because some of the most crucial standards like the 802 family are all paywalled. And it's not like it's warranted because if I need a standard I'm probably a vendor. Take high-speed Ethernet for example, there is such a proliferation of media types, lane counts, line encodings, FEC options and speed combinations that an engineer needs a reference from the source, and instead it's either third-party information or "stolen" PDFs.

Re: SMPTE Makes Its Standards Freely Accessible

#28

Post by plorkyeran »

duped wrote: post #23
geerlingguy wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think people have a flipped understanding of how these standards come to be. They don't gather industry experts in a conference room and whiteboard out a perfect design that everyone agrees on and then go off to build products. What happens is that companies develop products and services, and at some point it becomes more useful for those products to inter operate and protocols/interfaces between them need to be ag…

I have written software which needed to support SMPTE standards, and to do so I pirated the standard. The standards are initially written to reflect existing systems, but then more systems are developed later.

Re: SMPTE Makes Its Standards Freely Accessible

#29

Post by JdeBP »

gwerbin wrote: post #22
lars_francke wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Is "overhead" a euphemism for administrator salaries?

No. In such organizations the money goes towards all of the usual things such as tax, building rental, utilities, and licences, as well as employee salaries and social security contributions.

BSI Group, for example, paid 26.1% tax (25% corporation tax plus some other stuff) according to its 2025 financial statement.

In my direct experience, the people who write the standard texts get a room to sit in, power for laptops, a whiteboard, and tea/coffee and biscuits, a few days per year.

Re: SMPTE Makes Its Standards Freely Accessible

#30

Post by ksec »

seanhunter wrote: post #17
happytoexplain wrote: post #4

Earlier 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.

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.

Somewhere along the line, especially with Internet in late 00s people understand the term Open to be the same as Free. When in reality they are not.

But now it is all too late to debate and fix this.

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