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SMPTE Makes Its Standards Freely Accessible

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Re: SMPTE Makes Its Standards Freely Accessible

#71

Post by RossBencina »

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 think you are mostly correct. However if we expand beyond SMPTE to ISO, the modern C++ standards process provides a counterexample.

Re: SMPTE Makes Its Standards Freely Accessible

#72

Post by _kst_ »

jjmarr wrote: post #21
seanhunter wrote: post #17

Earlier 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.

Strictly speaking it's the ISO C standard. ISO issues each new edition of the standard, and ANSI adopts it.

This was reversed for the first standard, which ANSI published in 1989; ISO adopted it, with editorial changes, in 1990. The term "ANSI C" usually (not entirely correctly) refers to the 1989 standard. If you want to refer to a particular version, it's best to refer to "ISO C" and the date (1990, 1999, 2011, 2023).

The money you pay for a copy of the standard doesn't go to the people who do the work of writing it, who are either volunteers or paid by their employers.

Re: SMPTE Makes Its Standards Freely Accessible

#73

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

kyrra wrote: post #64
defgeneric wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A justification for this would be: states choose these providers to accurately present building codes (keeping up with the right versions/revisions is a lot of work, etc) because there's risk in simply publishing the PDFs and leaving it to basically anyone to curate. But the providers (like ICC) also tend to lock these deals in with state laws (not sure if they lobby for it, but I would imagine they do). When you thi…

It also locks up things for homeowners that want to DIY a solution fixing a house. Obviously people fix things without looking at the codes (and there are plenty of horror stories out there), but if we opened up house codes for people to actually look at and refer to, homeowners could potentially better find how to do things properly, especially with AI.

This would potentially lead to a whole lot of injured people. There are already DIY jobs that are safe for homeowners to do. But some really should be done by a professional.

It's one thing to make the POP3 standard free; worst case your mail gets lost. It's another to make the standard for the electrical code free, so that people can incorrectly implement its quite complicated rules, and result in things like fires and electrocution.

Re: SMPTE Makes Its Standards Freely Accessible

#74

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

kelnos wrote: post #52
cpgxiii wrote: post #34

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.

If you make a thing and copyright it, you get to dictate terms. But the legal alternative would be a clean room implementation. The implementation team never saw the standard, so it's not being used.

Re: SMPTE Makes Its Standards Freely Accessible

#75

Post by justinclift »

kyrra wrote: post #64
defgeneric wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A justification for this would be: states choose these providers to accurately present building codes (keeping up with the right versions/revisions is a lot of work, etc) because there's risk in simply publishing the PDFs and leaving it to basically anyone to curate. But the providers (like ICC) also tend to lock these deals in with state laws (not sure if they lobby for it, but I would imagine they do). When you thi…

It also locks up things for homeowners that want to DIY a solution fixing a house. Obviously people fix things without looking at the codes (and there are plenty of horror stories out there), but if we opened up house codes for people to actually look at and refer to, homeowners could potentially better find how to do things properly, especially with AI.

> especially with AI.

While AI models still hallucinate commonly, this might not be the best use of it.

The downsides of the occasional hallucinated answer for building standards seems like it could be pretty bad. Seems much worse than the upsides?

Re: SMPTE Makes Its Standards Freely Accessible

#77

Post by ComputerGuru »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #73
kyrra wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also locks up things for homeowners that want to DIY a solution fixing a house. Obviously people fix things without looking at the codes (and there are plenty of horror stories out there), but if we opened up house codes for people to actually look at and refer to, homeowners could potentially better find how to do things properly, especially with AI.

This would potentially lead to a whole lot of injured people. There are already DIY jobs that are safe for homeowners to do. But some really should be done by a professional. It's one thing to make the POP3 standard free; worst case your mail gets lost. It's another to make the standard for the electrical code free, so that people can incorrectly implement its quite complicated rules, and result in things like fires…

This is a patently ridiculous take. People are still DIYing the very things you are concerned about, just not knowing whether what they did was up to code or not. Just look up DIY on YouTube and see.

Re: SMPTE Makes Its Standards Freely Accessible

#78

Post by tonyarkles »

javawizard wrote: post #76
RossBencina wrote: post #69

Great, now do AES and IEEE.

At least AES membership gets you free access to all of their standards, which is more than can be said for IEEE. Source: I'm a card-carrying AES member.

And pretty cheap. I was a member for a year, just to get access to the entire AES67 standard. I think it was $65 for the membership at the time.

Re: SMPTE Makes Its Standards Freely Accessible

#79

Post by cpgxiii »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #74
kelnos wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

If you make a thing and copyright it, you get to dictate terms. But the legal alternative would be a clean room implementation. The implementation team never saw the standard, so it's not being used.

Yeah, clean room implementation is the only way - and the route chosen by the aravis project that builds a FOSS implementation (which is a really great piece of software, way nicer to work with and easier to debug than the terrible vendor SDKs).
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