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...

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.

>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.