Slashdot is reporting that the BBC Trust are going to be meeting with the Open Source Consortium over the BBC's new on-demand iPlayer video service. The service is currently planned to utilise Microsoft DRM technology, which of course will be a problem for anyone wanting to enjoy the content somewhere other than Windows.
"With the Launch of the BBC's iPlayer imminent, the BBC trust has agreed to hear the Open Source Consortium's concerns regarding the BBC iPlayer's tie in with Microsoft's software. The move by the BBC to use Windows Media DRM & their apparent lack of commitment towards other platforms has caused outrage in many circles and prompted several online petitions."
The BBC have previously been petitioned by free software users and user groups over the decision to utilise Microsoft DRM, which will lock the on-demand video services so that it is only usable by Windows users.
As a public service broadcaster, the BBC pledge "to serve everyone and enrich people's lives" and so it has been argued that by locking people into Windows technologies, the BBC aren't fulfilling this.
The willingness to talk however should be a good sign that the BBC are hopefully treating this concern seriously, and so I do hope that all computer users, regardless of which platform they use, will be able to benefit from the iPlayer service.
Following up from my recent post reporting that Google were planning to release more applications for Linux, it seems we have a new addition to the Google Linux family.
Google Desktop is Google's desktop search solution which has been available for Windows for quite some time and recently also had a Mac version.
Google have a list of the Linux version's features, which include their Quick Search Box, support for popular Linux filetypes, smart indexing and versioning.
It's worth mentioning that Linux already does have a desktop search solution - Beagle, which is, unlike Google Desktop, open source, has been around for a while now and integrates much better with GNOME.
Still, Google Desktop for Linux is definitely worth a try, especially if you're not currently using Beagle. Google Desktop is a free of charge (but not open source) download which should work on most modern distributions.
To install Google Desktop, head to the Download page, choose either the RPM or Deb (depending on your distribution) and then download and install the file (in most distributions you can double-click the file to install it).
As companies go, Google is often pretty Linux-friendly and pro-active about making their products work with Linux. Obviously, it helps that most of their products are web-based, but we already have a couple of desktop offerings for Linux from Google, such as Picasa and Google Earth.
The unofficial Google Operating System blog is reporting that Google are making plans to launch more desktop applications for Linux:
In a presentation [PDF] from Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, Google announced they'll release important Linux desktop applications this year.
The post there points out that us Linux users are missing things like Google Talk, Google Desktop and Google's SketchUp drawing tool.
Google recently renewed their commitment to building desktop apps for the Mac and have a Mac-specific downloads page and a Google Mac blog. Hopefully this move will get us Linux users some love too in the form of software and support.
I think this can only be a good thing and I'm all for more application support for Linux on the desktop.
