[Nottingham] BBC iPlayer petition

[Graeme Fowler]

On Thu, 2007-07-05 at 15:53 +0100, Martin Garton wrote:
> Probably the same gang who think it's clever to run binary video card
> drivers, I imagine.

Whilst not wishing to get involved in a flame war, I can't help but
point out that the "gang" who do so, do so primarily because they want
to extract the best performance or feature set from their graphics card
- not because they think it's "clever".

I'd postulate that the vast - and by that I mean far in excess of 99% of
computer users as a whole - really don't give a flying one about the
ethics, license implications, or in many cases legality of what they're
doing as long as the system does what they want it to.

Unfortunately "what they want it to" is quite limited, given that their
experience of computing is limited to the dominant player and the
software that runs on it. Ho hum.

If a closed source Linux version of the BBC iPlayer turned up, there are
plenty of people who would use it without considering the "ethical"
situation (I say ethical in inverted commas because ethics get redefined
depending on your point of view); Auntie Beeb would be pretty pleased
with itself, I'd expect, if that were the case.

Graeme