vnunet.com — The Open Source Consortium (OSC) has slammed the BBC over plans to lock online TV viewers into Microsoft products. The accusations come after the BBC announced that its new on-demand services will be limited to Microsoft Windows. OSC believes this is anti-competitive, and would be in breach of the broadcaster's charter.
Feb 6, 2007 View in Crawl 4
ottodvFeb 7, 2007
Mac and Linux users in Britain should then be exempted from paying (at least part of) the compulsory license fee, which goes to pay for the BBC. Seems unfair to make people pay for a service they can't use.
lukychmzFeb 7, 2007
well I use windows so I really dont care if they ever actually make an apple version so all 10 apple owners can see the beebs shows too :P
altotusFeb 7, 2007
First off, BBC is not excluding anyone, but they are saying that they'll implement a solution and get it working with Windows first, then other things. More or less reasonable, but it should be unnecessary since there are various existing solutions that would make the content accessible to all platforms (not just Mac/PC/Linux). The problem for them is that they want to impose some arbitrary limits on the time you can keep and watch the content, and the number of times you can view it.The problem isn't a platform one, per se, but a fundamental misunderstanding of distribution of the content, archiving it, etc. First, they are making available content that they are also broadcasting. The viewer already has a right to record the broadcast without any of the restrictions that they are looking to impose on the downloads. So what's the point in the restrictions anyway, are they intended to be punitive against people the flub programming their VCR/Tivo/DVD recorder? The online quality is not likely to exceed that of their broadcasts, and if you accept that the BBC is simply simulcasting or rebroadcasting content that people original had license to do with as they wish (other than otherwise already limited by copyright), then how do DRM regimes make any sense? Doubly so if you consider that DRM regimes typically have a operational lifetime of 2-3 weeks.So, if the DRM regime is illogical, and people have a right to receive broadcasts and time-shift them, and the initial broadcast itself is public, and the BBC intends to make backlogs of shows available... Then why are they wasting time and effort working on developing a public archive and indexing it. They might need to seed the shows, but the public has proven itself more capable in handling the indexing and distribution end of the equation.The BBC should rethink what it's trying to accomplish. They should either make nothing available, or provide everything DRM-free in a platform-neutral format and encourage peer-to-peer distribution to relieve them from the bandwidth and systems overhead involved in making the content available. The proposed middle ground DRM-affected solution makes no sense.
gmorganFeb 7, 2007
This person is so clearly an expert on computing. All those supercomputers that run Linux are so clearly outdated. As are all the RISC processors out there Linux supports.x86 is the equivalent of rotary engines. True most Linux users run x86 but at the very least my OS will port to modern archs quite easily.
gmorganFeb 7, 2007
You speak as if that payment is voluntary. If you don't pay they charge you thousands and can send you to prison. Whenever people talk about change people prattle out worthless dogma about tradition etc.