6 Jun
2007
6 Jun
'07
3:06 p.m.
On Wed, 2007-06-06 at 18:21 +0200, Nick Copeland wrote:
It seems a bit sad that any Linux advocate should be
backing this operation,
it would cost about $1500 per year to get access to any kind of support for
the SDK or advice on best practices and cosiderably more if you really want
to participate. You could stump up $175 per year yourself to propose changes
as long as you can find somebody paying the full price or more to back you.
It is a commercial directive not an open movement. From a perspective of
Linux audio it is already a pain that the Midi Manufacturers Association
want cash for their specifications.
So is the argument for this specification will be 'the professional
applications will be using it' hence it becomes the standard?
The whole specification is delivered outside of a GPL, products using its
specifications are expected to pay royalty licensing and as such should not
be advocated as a part of any open source movement.
The proposal here was for an open format, not a closed consortium format,
the difference may be subtle and is apparantly lost on some people.
I'm not entirely sure what your objections are. I have the whole AAF
spec in front of me, downloaded for free. The BBC has been pushing AAF
towards more and more open sub-standards over the years, including its
soon-to-be-released adoption of XML rather than a totally ugly AAF-only
format for the file itself. There is no licensing fee, no license, no
patents. I am almost wondering if you are looking at the same thing I
am. I've gotten excellent support from the main members of the steering
committee, who happen to work for the BBC and are quite involved in its
open source work (Dirac and more).
I am not going to spend time on supporting a "new" (i.e. LA-specific)
interchange format when the vast majority of ardour users need
interchange with proprietary applications, several of which already
support AAF (not AAF-XML, yet). It has the industry more than a decade
to get the rather pitiful state of affairs that AAF represents already,
and I don't hold out hope of any magic bullets. There is a lot of
collective wisdom that went into its design, even though it does smack
of design-by-committee.
IMO, the real problems with AAF as it currently stands is its horrendous
complexity and its inability to be filesystem neutral.
--p