Open Standards Are Slowly Winning, and It Matters
SMPTE, the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, made its standards freely accessible. This landed on HN with genuine excitement, particularly from people in media production. The thread noted that explosive development in new media production approaches is being held back by standards that cost money to access, and that this move unblocks a lot of tooling work.
This sits alongside Google hitting 50% IPv6 adoption, which prompted a thread about whether IPv6 will ever actually provide a better experience than IPv4 in practice. The IPv6 thread was less celebratory: commenters noted that many sites still aren't reachable via IPv6, and at least one person said the first thing they do on a fresh Linux install is disable IPv6 entirely because it fixes problems.
The pattern: open standards matter enormously for tooling ecosystems, but adoption is slow and uneven. SMPTE going open is genuinely good news for media tech builders. IPv6 at 50% Google traffic is a milestone, but the last mile of actual developer experience remains broken.
So what?
If you're building in the media production or broadcast space, the SMPTE standards being freely available removes a real barrier to building compliant tools. For networking infrastructure, IPv6 is now unavoidable at scale, but you still need to handle the dual-stack reality gracefully for at least another few years.