Re: [Fsfe-uk] BBC's DRM Iplayer windows only

[Philip Hands]

On Mon, Dec 31, 2007 at 02:25:09PM +0000, Chris Croughton wrote:
...
> The point is that distributing executable-only is a pretty good way of
> making it secure from most people.  If it wasn't, then there would be no
> problem hacking it to run on free OSs...

Except that a lot of the people that would be most interested in getting a
Free Software player would not contemplate that sort of hack, as it would
almost certainly require some sort of copyright violation to achieve,
and would probably contaminate them when it came to producing a clean
implementation.

I'd say that both the "it's no more than a French translation" and the
"compilation is almost encryption" positions are rather extreme, with
the truth lying somewhere between them.

> (No, I don't like DRM.  Music etc. which is distributed DRM locked I
> simply don't use, the same for IE-only and Flash websites.  That's their
> loss, they don't get my custom, I vote with my wallet.   I don't like
> the BBC using my TV tax to develop a bad replay system, the same as I
> don't like the government using my other taxes to run their wars and ID
> databases.  But I also don't like fanaticism wherever it is, including
> "free is perfect, everything else is evil" fanaticism.)

As an extra data-point here, a friend of mine phoned me out of the
blue after seeing my photo in The Register when I was protesting
outside the BBC.  It seems that until recently she used to work in the
same office as the iPlayer developers.  She tells me that the bulk of
(or perhaps all of) the developers use Firefox to develop their stuff
(because it works better). only using IE for testing, and then just
before release they intentionally cripple it to only work on IE.

That strikes me as pretty outrageous.

It does make me wonder if the BBC is being used by MS in order for
them to get some leverage in the set-top box market (which is currently
dominated by GNU/Linux AFAICT) by ensuring that the ability to grab BBC
content via the Internet is something that's exclusive to set-top boxes
with OSs licensed from MS.

Cheers, Phil.