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 _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-user mailing list Linux-audio-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.linuxaudio.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/linux-audio-user
