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...
>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.
The git part of github is a very small part of it, they are using Github issues etc which are not exportable/cross-platform.
So yes, you can git clone the repo and get the HTML, but if you want all the other stuff (the "github based workflows") then you have to use github.
> but if you want all the other stuff (the "github based workflows") then you have to use github.
Except what would you want it for? The issues and wikis and "github based workflows" are for people working on a thing, not for people using that thing or depending on it.
People that write standards and work on committees that write standards are working on a thing.
SMPTE have chosen github because it has the other stuff to allow them to manage the committee work, handle the issues raised in committees, drafts, tagging different versions, dealing with the committee processes etc.
They could have chosen something like JIRA, so at least we've avoided that.
That's what they said in the post about it being open.
They've moved the internal email mailing lists and other workflow to github as well as using git for the version control of the source.
Right. But people that write standards and work on committees that write standards are going to use whatever it is that the coordinating org wants, or whatever they can agree on, and they by definition will have access to it. For everyone else, none of that is of any relevance (at least beyond the ability to listen in on the process as it happens).