Learning from Education

Last week I went along to the Westminster Education Forum. The programme was only peripherally concerned with open source – Mark Taylor from Sirius was talking – but I wanted to get a feel for the context in which computers were being used in schools. As well as Mark, there was a representative from Microsoft: no surprise there, but what was very noticeable was the way that Microsoft's software was simply a given in the educational context. This is extremely unfortunate, at many levels...

On Open Enteprise blog.

BBC Listens - or Pretends To...

Good to hear:

The BBC Trust has asked to meet open source advocates to discuss their complaints over the corporation's Windows-only on demand broadband TV service, iPlayer.

The development came less than 48 hours after a meeting between the Open Source Consortium (OSC) and regulators at Ofcom on Tuesday. Officials agreed to press the trust, the BBC's governing body, to meet the OSC. The consortium received an invitation on Wednesday afternoon.

Since they had to be shoved into doing this by Ofcom, I somehow can't see the BBC actually doing anything as a result. But I'm willing to be proved wrong.

Time for BBC to Face the Music

Great to see the plucky Open Source Consortium getting its terrier-like teeth into the corpulent flesh that is the BBC:

The Open Source Consortium has written to Ofcom, the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) and the BBC Trust, asking for a re-examination of the effects of the BBC's iPlayer (TV on-demand) service being tied into Microsoft Windows Media Player for at least two years and, by extension, new versions of Windows, to be considered.

OSC Chief Executive Iain Roberts said "This action from the BBC effectively promotes one operating system vendor at the expense of others. It is very disturbing that the BBC should be using licence payers' money to affect the operating system market in this way. Imagine if the BBC were to launch new digital channels, but only make them available on a certain make of television - there would be uproar."

We can't let the BBC get away with this, and it's great to see the OSC stepping into the arena to take on the bloated behemoth.