[Nottingham] BBC iPlayer petition

[Martin Garton]

On Thu, 2007-07-05 at 16:09 +0100, Graeme Fowler wrote:
> 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 don't claim to fully understand everyones reasons, so I attempted to
summarise.  I admit calling people "clever" may have been rather
flamebait.  Sorry about that.

> 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.

I couldn't agree more.  The point I failed to make is this:

I believe that the subset of people who condone the behaviour of
companies that routinely seek to remove the freedom of their users by
buying their products and/or accepting their restricted software in one
arena (graphics cards) are likely to be much the same subset who also
accept similar restrictions in another arena (software drm of media)

> 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.

Yes. 

I sometimes keep my objections to myself about this sort of thing, but
in the case of the BBC, I think they have higher standards to live up
to.

-- 
Martin.

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