[Gllug] EU council streaming petition

[Kristian Rink]

Martin A. Brooks schrieb:

> We're not talking about software. We're talking about an objection to
> publicly funded AV streams only being available in a disagreeable
> format.  One that's perfectly decodeable on the platform in question.
> 

As "e-Government" starts to gain speed, I see more and more governments
around here placing documents on their web site using, say, *.doc or
*.xls documents - of course, this is something you "might" be able to
perfectly work with using OpenOffice.org and friends, but you can't be
sure of that as there still are minor incompatibilities. There also are
governmental web sites in Germany that require you to run some MSIE
variant to access them - surely you can come over most of these things
using some tool to switch your browser identification, and you see that
most of the site works. Does _all_ of it work? Will it _always_ be there
for you whenever you need it, using a platform that is not "officially"
supported?

In most of these cases, I guess you're at risk of suddenly using access
to information important to you because some small thing has changed,
say, the codec used in the video streaming, the version of MS Office to
save those documents, ... . The point is that IMHO public institutions
should be "educated" to pay awareness to those platform differences by
providing information stored in an accessible, non-discriminatory way.
There are options to do so, and I would say they're not more difficult
to use than "proprietary" ones. But we need to tell people that we
demand this accessibility. As long as they tend to provide information
in a "proprietary" format and we merrily mess around using our tools to
access these information, nothing is likely to change. To make a
difference, our only option is to express the fact that by choice we are
using a different platform and that, talking about public interests, we
demand to have legal, full, guaranteed access to these information using
the platform of our choice. Everything else is a mistake IMO.

Cheers,
Kristian

-- 
Kristian Rink * http://zimmer428.net * http://flickr.com/photos/z428/
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"One dreaming alone, it will be only a dream; many dreaming together
is the beginning of a new reality." (Hundertwasser)
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