Remember buying the 430.10 standard pdf back in the days in order to build subreader.io's cinema integration. Nice that it is openly available now!
SMPTE Makes Its Standards Freely Accessible
41–50 of 109 posts
Re: SMPTE Makes Its Standards Freely Accessible
#42I don't understand why any standards body would consider not doing this as a default.
Construction codes are still pay walled.
NEC (electric) is $170: https://www.nfpa.org/product/nfpa-70-national-electrical-cod...
IPC (plumbing) is $130: https://webstore.ansi.org/standards/icc/iccipc2024
And there are many others.
(I will say the YC company https://up.codes/ makes these much more accessible, and deals with local variants to these regulations)
Re: SMPTE Makes Its Standards Freely Accessible
#43Earlier 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 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.
USB-IF does in fact do this and has for years. Certified devices are allowed to have a "Certified USB" logo somewhere on them, usually placed next to the regulatory compliance marks.
Re: SMPTE Makes Its Standards Freely Accessible
#44I don't understand why any standards body would consider not doing this as a default.
Construction codes are still pay walled. NEC (electric) is $170: https://www.nfpa.org/product/nfpa-70-national-electrical-cod... IPC (plumbing) is $130: https://webstore.ansi.org/standards/icc/iccipc2024 And there are many others. (I will say the YC company https://up.codes/ makes these much more accessible, and deals with local variants to these regulations)
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Re: SMPTE Makes Its Standards Freely Accessible
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It used to be 18 dollars in the ANSI webstore for quite some time.
Also, you can look at smaller European countries putting their national cover page on it, and selling it cheaper. It’s the same standard, in English.
The C standard is only a bit cheaper at the Lithuanian agency: https://eshop.lsd.lt/public#!/product/info/0a640332-9273-166...
Sometimes it‘s much cheaper: the Germans sell IEC 62443-4-2 for 400 Euros, the Estonians for 40 Euros:
https://www.dinmedia.de/de/norm/csa-iec-62443-4-2/331021994?...
Re: SMPTE Makes Its Standards Freely Accessible
#46Earlier 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.
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 t…
People at NIST contribute to ISO standards.
Re: SMPTE Makes Its Standards Freely Accessible
#47At last. It's time the whole would gets on board with open standards that are truly open, and there is explosive devopment going on in the world of new approaches to media production and distribution that this can only aid. It's net-head vs. Bell-heads all over again, and one of the biggest reasons for the success of the IETF standards was the no-cost availability of all their standards.
We need a SciHub for standards docs. Since APIs have been ruled incopyrightable in the US, building a library that implements the standard shouldn’t itself be illegal.
This will only increase innovation.
Re: SMPTE Makes Its Standards Freely Accessible
#48I don't understand why any standards body would consider not doing this as a default.
Back in the day when I was doing this kind of thing, we had to buy a whole load of British Standards. They are £100s each, and they each cover a small part of work. If you’re designing steel structures you need one for basic structural design, one for loads on structures, one for steel structural design, one for the steel sections themselves, one for foundation design, one for execution of steel structures, and many many more. It’s thousands of pounds.
Re: SMPTE Makes Its Standards Freely Accessible
#49I 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 essentiall…
This even extends to how some standards are written: deliberately complex and poor work just to make it frustrating and ensure a high barrier of entry. And of course there are either no test suites or testing against them costs a fortune.
This is the kind of thing politicians in a reasonable world would make illegal and subject to sanctions.
Re: SMPTE Makes Its Standards Freely Accessible
#50I don't understand why any standards body would consider not doing this as a default.
Sometimes standards bodies are formed by an oligarchy of industry players who have decided that their businesses would be simplified by mutual interoperability. They have no interest in lowering any bar of entry for other players though; certainly, they don't care about some hobbyist who balks at forking up $300 for a document.