An exclusive gaming industry community targeted
to, and designed for Professionals, Businesses
and Students in the sectors and industries
of Gaming, New Media and the Web, all closely
related with it's Business and Industry.
A Rich content driven service including articles,
contributed discussion, news, reviews, networking, downloads,
and debate.
We strive to cater for cultural influencers,
technology decision makers, early adopters and business leaders in the gaming industry.
A medium to share your or contribute your ideas,
experiences, questions and point of view or network
with other colleagues here at iVirtua Community.
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is planning protests at key BBCsites because it believes the national broadcaster's management hasbeen corrupted by Microsoft. Protests will be mounted outside Television Centre in London andoutside the corporation's Manchester offices on Tuesday, 14 August.
The activists' move has been sparked by increasing concern over theWindows-only, Internet Explorer-only beta release of iPlayer, the BBC'son-demand application.
A Downing Street website petition calling on Gordon Brown to raise the issue in Parliament has been signed by more than 13,000 people as of writing.
TheRegister wrote:
In particular, the FSF says the appointment of Erik Huggers, theformer director of Microsoft's Windows digital media division, as theBBC's controller of the future media and technology group in May thisyear, is evidence of Redmond-driven corruption of the BBC's core values.
In a statement, the FSF said: "They have given Microsoft completecontrol. BBC programming is in the hands of a US based corporation, andthe BBC has given up the fight for open access." The group calls on BBCdirector general Mark Thompson to "clean up the mess he has made" overthe iPlayer.
The FSF has long pursued an agenda against Digital Rights Management(DRM), which the BBC says iPlayer must incorporate so it can legallydistribute third party programming.
The BBC Trust, which is the corporation's independent governing body, met withrepresentatives from the Open Source Consortium (OSC) to discuss theirinsistence that the iPlayer should be made available on all platformsas soon as possible, regardless of DRM. More than a week later, BBCmanagement have yet to respond to the trust's call for them to liaisewith the OSC, however.
The BBC did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the protests. The FSF's pages on its action are here.
to be perfectly honest I don't even like the iPlayer apart from the fact that you have to have windows media player 11 (with genuine advantage!) use internet explorer and the that it only works on Windows, it's sucky, it's hard to use complicated to download and basically they should have made it alot better even though it's in 'beta' they've had it in closed beta for ages.
The FSF bods need to get a life (and probably a girlfriend) instead of being such annoying self richeous prats. Who cares if the iPlayer only runs with IE? I use the BBC website to read news stories not watch video. If I wanted to watch BBC news I'd turn on BBCNews24. I mean over a billion people are living below the poverty line and they see this as the most important issue of the moment?
Digg Topic
Tag topic on On del.icio.us
Technorati Search
Post to Slashdot
