[H]omer <spam@xxxxxxx> espoused:
> Verily I say unto thee, that Roy Schestowitz spake thusly:
>> ____/ Kier on Monday 24 December 2007 09:44 : \____
>>> On Mon, 24 Dec 2007 03:44:36 +0000, Roy Schestowitz wrote:
>
>>> If they talked about Linux, would that be advertising?
>>
>> There are (at least) two things to consider here. Let's just use two
>> examples:
>>
>> 1. BBC as an agent for a monopoly - the BBC promotes the use of
>> Windows with iPlayer (and possibly with Silverlight to come).
>>
>> 2. The BBC is influenced by a collaboration that involves
>> inter-personal relationship. As employee of one company liaise with
>> those of another, it's expected that there will be bias and selective
>> awareness. The BBC rarely coveres GNU/Linux, _despite_ the fact that
>> it dominates supercomputers, devices and it is also the
>> fastest-growing platform in servers, mainframes, and even desktops
>> (if three independent surveys from this year are anything to judge
>> by).
>
> The other thing to consider is that GNU/Linux is Free, Windows is not.
> How can it be "advertising" to talk about something that's Free? That's
> like saying that talking about the *air* is advertising. There's a big
> difference between promoting a commercial product, and talking about a
> commodity that is universally free in both the financial and political
> sense. Surely Kier should understand that implicitly, which is why it
> surprises me that he should even ask such a question.
>
Kier is often shockingly naive about such things. The malaise at the
BBC covers a range of areas, including hiring a load of managers whose
job it will be to sack the production workers, attempting to move the
perfectly good production capabilities in London up to Manchester, with
no clear picture of how the equity members will be reimbursed for all
their travel, and no clear picture of how the more limited facilities in
Manchester will be up to the job. There is equally no obvious route
around the increasing imports of US television, most of which is of poor
quality. The cuts in current affairs are due to continue for some time,
mostly around (wait for it...) investigative journalism - the very kind
of journalism which used to turn up the corruption around the likes of
Ashley Highfield and the appalling and probably illegal Microsoft deals
with Silverlight. The millions spent on the Microsoft iPlayer would
have been enough to cover the costs of the London-based production for
many years.
If Kier really wanted to know about this, he could buy a copy of Private
Eye every week and follow the story as it progresses. He doesn't want
to know, rather, he would prefer to pretend all is fine at the BBC,
whereas, in fact, it is far from fine.
The people who brought us Nicam, Teletext, RDS, Dirac Video Codec,
Public Service Broadcasting, Any questions (political analysis since
1948), as well as Test Match Special and The Today Programme (since
about 1956 or so) are being dragged into deals with commercial companies
which offer no advantage to the licence-fee-payers, rather, give these
companies a nice easy way of tapping into all that licence-fee cash.
--
| Mark Kent -- mark at ellandroad dot demon dot co dot uk |
| Cola faq: http://www.faqs.org/faqs/linux/advocacy/faq-and-primer/ |
| Cola trolls: http://colatrolls.blogspot.com/ |
| My (new) blog: http://www.thereisnomagic.org |
|
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