It's Déjà Vu, All Over Again

A few months back, I wrote about a petition calling for ERT, the Greek national broadcaster, to make its content freely available. Now it looks like ERT is following in the misguided footsteps of the BBC in terms of platforms:

Greek Open Source developers are protesting that ERT, Greece's national broadcaster, will make its online archive available only for users of Microsoft Windows and Apple Mac OSX.

The Hellenic Linux User Group six months ago approached ERT, after finding out the public broadcaster was restricting their access to a new archive. ERT is a public organisation, the developers argue, and should not discriminate against users of Open Source.

In some ways, the situation here is even worse than for the BBC:

ERT is developing an archive of its broadcast material, digitising film, video, pictures and hosting them online. The archive is going to be developed in a 1.95 million euro project, the major part of which is funded by the European Union, the Open Source developers say.

Since the money is being paid for by the EU, it follows that access should not be limited to a couple of platforms.

I Fear the Greeks, Not Bearing Gifts

As a big fan of the Greek national television channel ERT (available as a stream), I was interested in this campaign to gain open access to the ERT audiovisual archive:

Greek citizens, but also citizens of other countries, we jointly sign this text on the occasion of ERT’s choice to distribute its audiovisual archive non-freely to the public. Our aim and ambition is to publicize our propositions so that they become the starting point of an open dialog among the Greek society, the European and global public audience and to signal the revision of backward policies and the creation of common political wealth.

Few days ago, the ERT administration presented the beginning of the availability, only via Internet streaming, of a part of its audiovisual archive. This move constitutes an important first step, which, however, in our opinion, is tarnished by the fact that the public availability of the archive is not made free, although the Greek and European citizens have paid their money to make the production and digitization of the archive feasible.

To which I can only say: σωστά. (Via Open Access News.)