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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.

Last time I checked (a few years ago), you had to pay some ridiculous price (230$ iirc) to view the SQL specification. SQL!

Once upon a time, acquiring a standard involved writing to a far away address and then waiting "six to eight weeks" for a paper document to show up in your mailbox. By 1995 (when internet access became common) SMPTE was seventy years old. Certain, uh, expectations had become concretized by then, and it took considerable time and effort to overcome those.

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)

Because it costs a massive amount to get standards with this technical quality. They go through meetings, have a decent amount of staff to run, organize, have conference costs (locations...), take years to get done.

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.

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 essentially all they could be used for were (1) as a licensee producing closed-source software for their own cameras, or (2) you as customer trying to complain to your camera/software vendor that they failed to implement some part of the standard correctly.

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.

You have to fund the local national body tracking these and distribution and so on. Bigger thing back in the day of physical copies. Which involved real costs. Just imagine allowing anyone to order free paper... Only EU does that...

So then next question who should fund whole thing? Tax payers or the companies which is vast majority of users. Well self-funding organisation sounds really good for politicians. Move the costs to companies. Thus paid standards.

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.

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.

Does that actually mean "freely" (as in beer) available, or it must be able for anyone to be procurred?

I would assume that France, like many countries heavily rely on ISO standards, which in many cases cost some money. Or is it the case that those standards are not explicitly mandated, but are essentially only fulfillable by knowing the ISO standard?

In the Netherlands it doesn’t quite work like that in reality. There’s a whole bunch of laws that refer to norms indirectly. In theory you could meet requirements without them but in practice it is absolutely impossible.

>can anyone pin point the significance of making this entirely Free?

It's critical for data encodings (codecs, metadata,) because without free standards developers will attempt to reverse engineer from sample files, resulting in poor interoperability and causing chaos for those implementers that actually do bother to acquire and read the spec.

GitHub == git, which is free. You can clone the repo and push it to wherever. No comment on the rest. I am just pointing out that using GitHub for source code doesn't mean mean that code can't be easily forked or used elsewhere. I suspect GitHub is for convenience since the majority of folks using git use it.

Opened up my older clothes dryer to replace the belt. Has a two-pager schematic inside. Reminded me we used to have a TV that came with similar details.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_of_Motion_Picture_and_...

I had the same question. I clicked on their menu About > Who is SMPTE page and it didn't define the acronym either.

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 thought it was the Transatlantic album (StoltMorsePortnoyTrewavas)

I saw it and thought it was an extension to the the SMTP standard.

Explained here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jk9xpH5aUtk

Also the name of prog supergroup Transatlantic's first album, SMPT:E, a play on the band members names.

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.