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.
geerlingguy 45 minutes ago [-]
I don't understand why any standards body would consider not doing this as a default.
happytoexplain 34 minutes ago [-]
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.
seanhunter 14 minutes ago [-]
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.
jjmarr 5 minutes ago [-]
Buying the ANSI C standard still costs about $300. Same for C++.
Nobody does it. gcc/clang implement it from the "drafts", which are published online due to the need to discuss them prior to standardization.
geerlingguy 28 minutes ago [-]
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.
andrewaylett 16 minutes ago [-]
The people requiring adherence to a specific standard are not the people who then need to pay to see what they're supposed to be adhering to :(.
Strictly, just because the standard costs money doesn't mean that the information within it is otherwise unavailable. The C++ spec is an amusing example of this: the actual spec costs $$$, but the final draft is freely available. I can't imagine they sell many copies. I know that back when I was employed to work on a C++ compiler I only had access to the draft.
If demonstrating conformance is important, I suspect that the cost of access to specifications is only going to be a small fraction of the cost of certification. And as I understand things, it's certification that's the target of charging for specifications.
btown 22 minutes ago [-]
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!
thx67 16 minutes ago [-]
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.
stogot 24 minutes ago [-]
It’s a proprietary standard moving to an open standard
lars_francke 10 minutes ago [-]
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".
gwerbin 5 minutes ago [-]
Is "overhead" a euphemism for administrator salaries?
cloud8421 24 minutes ago [-]
Off-topic, but also the title of the first album of the progressive supergroup Transatlantic.
cyberax 35 minutes ago [-]
What the heck is SMPTE?
adrian_b 31 minutes ago [-]
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.
jonizzle 18 minutes ago [-]
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.
dogman1050 6 minutes ago [-]
Also the name of prog supergroup Transatlantic's first album, SMPT:E, a play on the band members names.
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.
23 minutes ago [-]
jimmygrapes 6 minutes ago [-]
I thought it was the Transatlantic album (StoltMorsePortnoyTrewavas)
Rendered at 18:06:58 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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.
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.
Unless the goal is not to create standards, but instead to control access to said standard.
Strictly, just because the standard costs money doesn't mean that the information within it is otherwise unavailable. The C++ spec is an amusing example of this: the actual spec costs $$$, but the final draft is freely available. I can't imagine they sell many copies. I know that back when I was employed to work on a C++ compiler I only had access to the draft.
If demonstrating conformance is important, I suspect that the cost of access to specifications is only going to be a small fraction of the cost of certification. And as I understand things, it's certification that's the target of charging for specifications.
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.
In the organizations I know - including ISO - the money is basically exclusively spent on "overhead".
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.