51–60 of 109 posts
I 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)
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 essentiall…
Is that legally enforceable? IANAL, but that feels dubious to me. Feels like there should be a way around that.
I 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.
Even a few thousand dollars isn't much of a barrier for a company that wants to build a product.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
What the heck is SMPTE?
Then I scrolled to the bottom of the page and I did see it in the footer: SOCIETY OF MOTION PICTURE AND TELEVISION ENGINEERS
Today I learned
I don't understand why any standards body would consider not doing this as a default.
Someone has to pay for this. Making companies (and often, many of the individual members do this out of their own pocket) pay it all means worse standards, as some people stop going.
Sharing the cost to make the standard makes it a better mix of getting good standards and having low costs for final users.
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…
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…
What 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…
They live in a ho-ho-hole
(Tiny hole)
That is usually empty
(Usually empty, tiny too)
They live by a code
(Dit dit dit dit)
That is usually SMPTE
Which stands for
Society of Motion Picture & Television Engineers
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> these standards explicitly prohibited their use in implementing any open source implementation of the standards Is that legally enforceable? IANAL, but that feels dubious to me. Feels like there should be a way around that.