Links for 2007-09-10
- Chicken Yoghurt has a wonderful Open Source Press Release that I'd encourage people to read and post to their own sites... Solid and entertaining.
- The Government, in responding to a petition about the iPlayer being cross-platform, has said that it's a condition of its launch and will be made so as soon as possible My big hope is that this convinces any laggards at the BBC that going for the Microsoft-only route is not now and will never be an acceptable approach for a public service organisation in the UK.
- Women with meat for hair as spotted by Jason Kottke It made me think about what it would be like if your hair was actually made of sheaves of your own personal meat and was used, like dogs use their tongues, to cool you down. Gross.
- Just so people know, I'll be doing an overview and introduction to Fire Eagle at the Future of Web Apps Expo in London in about a month I talked a bit about Fire Eagle at Hack Day and at dconstruct yesterday, but we should be pretty close to letting people see things a little more clearly by then.
Comments
Please stay on-topic, informative and polite. I reserve the right to remove comments for whatever vague capricious reasons seem reasonable at the time.
Clearly a PSO needs to use cross-platform technology but maybe you're inadvertently going a bit far saying Microsoft-only will never be acceptable; Microsoft's Silverlight will soon run on Mac and Linux, including full DRM support.
→ Posted by: The Metropix Team at September 10, 2007 3:19 AM
That, unfortunately, will probably be the conclusion that both the BBC and the regulators come to, but I think it's the wrong one. The big damage from this is the BBC adding its stamp to any one particular technology company's approach to DRM - particularly a large player under antitrust investigation. Using the public's money to give Microsoft a monopoly in TV distribution is, I'm afraid, just wrong. I have no problem with Microsoft per se, but the BBC has a specific obligation not to deform the market, and I can't see how it can do anything other than deform the market if it restricts itself to any one organisation's DRM tech.
For me, the Apple / Windows thing is a sideshow. It's important to me that it works on Apple and Linux, but really that's been a trojan horse for most people in this debate (I believe). The reason for pushing that approach has been tactical - to make it very difficult for the organisation to use only Microsoft DRM without supplementing it by at least one approach.
Having two solid standards for DRM is a good thing for everyone, if for no other reason than it'll drive the restrictions down to the absolute minimum (if not dismantle it completely) as the organisations compete for audience approval. This is the way the market works, and it seems like in this case a decent market from the consumer's end in choices between DRM systems would be of general good things for everyone.
→ Posted by: Tom Coates at September 10, 2007 11:09 AM