* Posts by Rod Campbell

1 publicly visible post • joined 25 Jun 2007

Open sourcers rattle EU sabre at BBC on demand player

Rod Campbell

Open Source Zealots

Oh god - the open source religous zealots are out in force trying to sound like the majority when in fact they are a minority. I saw a comment earlier that would like the reader of this discussion to infer that Ubuntu Linux is outselling Vista - please...... It may well be that Amazon is shipping more copies of Ubuntu than Vista but guess what, almost every new PC shipped today has Vista installed on it!

Now, I use both Ubuntu and Vista at home and like them both for different reasons. But here's the thing - In the mainstream consumer space (go to PC World to see these people) they are in the main buying Vista based PCs and perhaps Macs but definitely not Linux for some pretty obvious reasons (this may change when Linux has the usability and product ecosystem of Windows).

As such, the BBC has decided (quite rightly in my opinion) that they need to cater to the vast majority and have also decided that they require DRM capability (we can argue the merits of DRM another time :-) ) so the natural choice whether we like it or not is Windows Media Player. Get real folks, this is how things happen in the "real world".