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SMPTE Makes Its Standards Freely Accessible

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Re: SMPTE Makes Its Standards Freely Accessible

#31

Post by ksec »

From [1],

>This move is part of a broader effort to modernize the organization's Standards development and publication processes. Recent initiatives include:

>Adopting GitHub-based workflows for version control

>Issue tracking and automation

>Transitioning to structured HTML-based authoring

>Implementing an integrated publishing pipeline that streamlines document creation, review, validation and release.

I am not entirely sure the Hosting on Github, Issue tracking and automation, and HTML-based authoring are all good thing. Although I would guess it is still better than what they had.

And on another note, can anyone pin point the significance of making this entirely Free? SMPTE doesn't hold any patents. And I don't believe their original standards were hard to access. Are there any significant impact of this announcement?

[1] https://www.smpte.org/setting-the-standards-free?hsCtaTracki...

Re: SMPTE Makes Its Standards Freely Accessible

#32

Post by cortesoft »

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?

It costs money to operate a website, too.

Re: SMPTE Makes Its Standards Freely Accessible

#34

Post by cpgxiii »

geerlingguy wrote: post #2

I don't understand why any standards body would consider not doing this as a default.

Because these bodies want to maintain a moat for the products made by member companies. No more, no less.

A great example of this is the GigE Vision/GenICam standards that are used by basically all machine vision cameras, which were accessible to non-licensees but not usefully implementable (these standards explicitly prohibited their use in implementing any open source implementation of the standards). So essentially all they could be used for were (1) as a licensee producing closed-source software for their own cameras, or (2) you as customer trying to complain to your camera/software vendor that they failed to implement some part of the standard correctly.

Re: SMPTE Makes Its Standards Freely Accessible

#35

Post by cortesoft »

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 am not sure if this is what happens, but I could imagine an arrangement where you have a standard, and in order to advertise that you meet the standard, you are required to pay a fee to the standards body, and that fee is used to fund an audit to verify that you adhere to the standard.

It would be nice if, for example, USB did this so that I know a USB cable actually works with a specific standard before I buy it.

Re: SMPTE Makes Its Standards Freely Accessible

#36

Post by thx67 »

wowczarek wrote: post #26
thx67 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 standard…

The whole world benefits when our infrastructure can stay on spec and those specs are freely available for everyone. Specs are the vaccines holding civilization together.

Re: SMPTE Makes Its Standards Freely Accessible

#37

Post by asdcplib »

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…

This is mostly true, with some exceptions. The Digital Cinema standards (428, 429, 430, etc.) were in fact developed in conference rooms and on whiteboards. It was a greenfield application with no incumbent formats.

Re: SMPTE Makes Its Standards Freely Accessible

#38

Post by asdcplib »

ksec wrote: post #31

From [1], >This move is part of a broader effort to modernize the organization's Standards development and publication processes. Recent initiatives include: >Adopting GitHub-based workflows for version control >Issue tracking and automation >Transitioning to structured HTML-based authoring >Implementing an integrated publishing pipeline that streamlines document creation, review, validation and release. I am not ent…

>can anyone pin point the significance of making this entirely Free?

It's critical for data encodings (codecs, metadata,) because without free standards developers will attempt to reverse engineer from sample files, resulting in poor interoperability and causing chaos for those implementers that actually do bother to acquire and read the spec.

Re: SMPTE Makes Its Standards Freely Accessible

#39

Post by dare944 »

btown wrote: post #13
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.

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!

IP licensing and certification are entirely separate from access to standards documentation. Of course certifying conformance to a standard is going to have a cost. But publishing documentation that has already been written is effectively free.

Re: SMPTE Makes Its Standards Freely Accessible

#40

Post by asdcplib »

geerlingguy wrote: post #2

I don't understand why any standards body would consider not doing this as a default.

Once upon a time, acquiring a standard involved writing to a far away address and then waiting "six to eight weeks" for a paper document to show up in your mailbox. By 1995 (when internet access became common) SMPTE was seventy years old. Certain, uh, expectations had become concretized by then, and it took considerable time and effort to overcome those.
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