Flash Problem

Marcel Rieux m.z.rieux at gmail.com
Mon Jan 11 05:10:00 UTC 2010


On Sat, Jan 9, 2010 at 12:20 PM, Alan Cox <alan at lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk> wrote:
>> I believe you live in England. Does the BBC, who mainly developed

>> Because of DRM, it even seems unsure the BBC itself will use it:
>>
>> <http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/dec/22/bbc-drm-cory-doctorow>
>
> This doesn't affect webcasting.

Ooops, you're right. I just glimpsed the article. Suvayu Ali is right
in pointing out that it's very interesting.

Thank you for the information you give on the BBC and OFCOM. I now
understand the situation better. But rest assured that it's much worst
in Canada. Until last summer MIcrosoft even used the Radio-Canada home
page as a portal. Can you imagine?

As I already said, I wrote to Radio-Canada/CBC's CEO to advise him
that the page:

http://www.cbc.ca/video/#/Shows/

doesn't work with Linux. When he pretended he lacked budget to do
things correctly, I noted that at Radio-Quebec and PBS, who have much
less budget at their disposal, everything works fine. I added that on
the CBC's site, the videos from The Passionate Eye program played
perfectly. A few days later, the videos disappeared from the program's
site.

When you know that even at

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/

and

msn.com

flash!!! videos also play perfectly, you begin to think about
Microsoft kickbacks, mainly that this has been ongoing, sometimes at
Radio-Canada, sometimes, like now, at the CBC, since they began
webcasting 10 years ago.

According to Ed Gresko, if I remember well, the problem is caused by a
wrapper they employ.

All political parties, save the Green Party, which has only one
representative at the House of Commons, keep silent on the matter.
It's just as if the problem didn't exist.

At Gesca, La Presse, the most important paper chain in Quebec, they
have a Microsoft drone who never spoke ONCE of proprietary formats or
tied sales and keeps pretty much silent about DRM. (It's hard to tell
because article don't appear with a title and reader comments are on
the same page as teh article. See:

<http://www.google.ca/search?&q=site%3Acyberpresse.ca+drm+OR%C2%A0%22digital+rights+management%22+dumais>

On the other side, /working for Linux/, there's facil.qc.ca , the
organisation that killed Linux-Quebec. Check:

http://www.linux-quebec.org/

Probably Jacques Gelinas -- former author of Linuxconf -- just got
pissed off and didn't renew the registration.

I was participating to Linux-Quebec. One fine day, somebody decided
that we needed a board. But the competences within the group weren't
established through projects. A board was elected whose members we had
never heard of. Dissensions ensued, FACIL was formed.

Today, they have about 5 (small) organisations and about 80
individuals as members. AFAIK, they never wrote to the the CBC's CEO,
the Conseil de Presse, etc. and I never could count on those people to
do anything useful. But they sure discuss the great issues at
lenght...

Communications Accessibles Montréal, the first ISP for individuals in
Montreal and where all the Unix geeks were, went out of business. When
I was there, I tried to obtain the number of members and never could:
there were some problems with the database, apparently. Revenu Quebec
said it didn't matter much to them since non-profit organisations
don't pay tax.

Special arrangements with schools, festivals and so on, were made that
costed CAM a lot of money. Free dental care was offered to employees,
etc. It seemed CAM was very rich!

Little friends were hired to write CGI scripts. Cost to the customer:
$90/hour... and of course the scripts didn't work. The companies asked
for NT servers and they got it.

Security updates weren't made and the servers were cleaned twice.
Pretty much everybody left and the remaining members were switched to
Cooptel, a coop. The potential for building a Linux community at CAM
was enormous, but...

It just seems everything Linux has to fail. Nothing planned, of
course. It just so happens.

Programmers say that if the code is good, Linux will succeed. I
sometimes fear it might not be so. A wiki describing the attitude of
every state towards open source would certainly be a useful tool.

Excuse me for being so long, but I don't believe all those things
"just happen". IMO, there's a lot of manipulation going on.


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