At 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.
>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?
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.
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.
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.
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".
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 digital movies for movie theaters.
Didn't realize they were so broad in scope. The only thing I had heard of was "SMPTE codes" used in audio recording to sync up multiple multi-track recording machines, so that e.g. you could record 30 tracks using two 16-track recorders (with one track on each machine used for the sync). I never bothered to look up what SMPTE meant.
At 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.
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...
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.
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.
2 replies →
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.
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.
7 replies →
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".
4 replies →
Off-topic, but also the title of the first album of the progressive supergroup Transatlantic.
What the heck is SMPTE?
I saw it and thought it was an extension to the the SMTP standard.
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 digital movies for movie theaters.
But they are getting back in the game with SMPTE 2110 which is a standard that describes how to send digital media over an IP network.
Explained here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jk9xpH5aUtk
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_of_Motion_Picture_and_...
Didn't realize they were so broad in scope. The only thing I had heard of was "SMPTE codes" used in audio recording to sync up multiple multi-track recording machines, so that e.g. you could record 30 tracks using two 16-track recorders (with one track on each machine used for the sync). I never bothered to look up what SMPTE meant.
Also the name of prog supergroup Transatlantic's first album, SMPT:E, a play on the band members names.
I thought it was the Transatlantic album (StoltMorsePortnoyTrewavas)