BBC Blog Network

Listed below are comments made by nevali between Thursday, 19th November 2009 and Sunday, 29th November 2009 (23 Hours Ago) .

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• BBC Digital Revolution rushes for you to download and edit 00:08am on 29 Nov 2009 “A restriction (ie., a "permissive license") does not necessarily make it a "closed source" product.”
  
  No, it doesn’t make it “closed source”, but it doesn’t necessarily make it “open source” either.
  
  There’s a (relatively broad) class of things which fall into a middle-ground: they’re not “open source” by most commonly-held definitions, but they’re clearly not closed-source either. There are plenty of other terms one could use to describe them…
  
• BBC Digital Revolution rushes for you to download and edit 00:07am on 29 Nov 2009 It’s worth bearing in mind that open source productions are not a new thing, and so a default expectation is one of conforming with the existing use. See, for example, Elephants Dream, or Big Buck Bunny, both of which are “open source productions” (they have always been called that), and so are a pretty good bar to measure against.
  
  
• Sharing iPlayer data 7:39pm on 27 Nov 2009 @RedversBKyle: both Apple’s iWork and the free OpenOffice.org will handle both Excel and OpenOffice (and, of course, CSV, though the latter is a relatively flawed format for anything with any complexity)
• Sharing iPlayer data 6:21pm on 27 Nov 2009 Hi Nick — As most of it’s tabular (and charts driven by tabular data), some kind of spreadsheet format would seem ideal (personally, OpenOffice would be my preferred format, but others would probably prefer Excel).
  
  
  
• Sharing iPlayer data 6:08pm on 27 Nov 2009 This is very cool, but I must confess that I was a little surprised to see “data”, “download” and “Powerpoint” in the same breath—it wouldn’t be most people’s first choice of format for sharing or exchanging stats, as it makes it very very difficult to get at the raw figures for further analysis.
• BBC Digital Revolution rushes for you to download and edit 7:05pm on 20 Nov 2009 On an utterly unrelated note from the license—A QuickTime movie (.mov) is just a container format, and contain anything from MPEG-1 to Avid DNxHD video and a similar gamut for audio.
• BBC Digital Revolution rushes for you to download and edit 7:01pm on 20 Nov 2009 There are a couple of different issues here.
  
  One is that the release of the rushes is being treated as representative of the production as a whole—this is to be expected. The general expectation is that in an “open source” project, this is the basis for all (released) aspects of it.
  
  The fact is, the license itself is not permissive when compared to most. It’s permissive compared to the default (i.e., no rights at all), but when compared to most open source and the Creative Commons licenses, it’s quite restrictive (and, indeed, is flawed to an extent).
  
  “Open source” itself is quite a specific term and has a fairly well-understood meaning. Indeed, Creative Commons quite deliberately steers clear of it, because some of the CC licenses are at odds with the principles of open source.
  
  First, there’s the distinction between “personal”, “charitable”, “educational” and “commercial” entities. This arguably the most flawed aspect of it at all, because what constitutes “commercial use” is rarely clear. In terms of Creative Commons, the situation in this regard is so bad that the only advice is to contact the licensor to ask them what they mean.
  
  Second, there are the “…except these purposes…” clauses (§2.3.5). These are about about as far removed from “open source” or “creative commons” as you can get within this context. The illegality aspect is simply noise, as something that’s illegal is illegal irrespective of what the license says.
  
  Within this section:
  
  “is not open access” — what does this mean? It’s not defined anywhere.
  
  “might be perceived as damaging the BBC's reputation for accuracy or impartiality” — perceived by whom? “might be”?
  
  “is intended for or targeted at children who are under 13 years old” — why?
  
  The no-advertising clause (§2.3.6) — huh?
  
  Beyond the general craziness of this clause, what does “or otherwise commercialise the Work or Derivative Work in any way” mean?
  
  (Examples: I want to put it on my CV and I get a job offer as a result; I do it as a lunchtime project at work and my boss wants to put it on the company website as an example of the skillset we have)
  
  The “BBC Application” display clause (§2.3.8) is very unclear—given that the license includes a grant for use of the “BBC Application”, it’s not at all obvious what exactly the “sole editorial control” applies to, and in what contexts.
  
  Typo — “2.3” should be “2.4” (and so on).
  
  Sharing (§2.3) is very fuzzy. It’s not entirely clear what somebody wishing to distribute’s obligations are from reading it (it can be inferred from context, but the wording is very poor).
  
  Logo use (§2.5) trademark law possibly covers this anyway (rendering the clause moot), but I’m not clear on how the logo alone isn’t derivative work as specified by the rest of the license (if it’s included in the work, as indicated by §2.5). No other clause actually references the logos, so there shouldn’t be an expectation of grant-of-rights anyway.
  
  Indemnity (§5) — is this a joke?
  
  Modifications & Notifications (§7.4): you simply can’t that. It’s not Terms and Conditions for a website (plus, how would you notify people?)
  
  The whole thing reads as a license for three separate things (the rushes, the logos, the player) all of which have different (and slightly conflicting) terms. None of it is particularly representative “open source”, and all of it is quite restrictive.
  
  The only thing it honestly encourages me to do is steer well clear. I’m not willing to risk inadvertently breaching the license, no matter what assurances the production team might give (ultimately, it wouldn’t be their decision).
• The Ingex Project- an Introduction 10:30am on 20 Nov 2009 Minor follow-up:
  
  It’s worth linking to WHP155 “File-based Production: Making It Work In Practice”, which goes into quite a bit more detail about how Ingex is used and interoperability with other parts of the chain (e.g., Avid)
• Introducing the Distribution Application Layer Research Section 7:49pm on 19 Nov 2009 I’m particularly interested in this “web API” for remote controls (I presume the intention is a lightweight HTTP server running on-device, and mDNS or similar for discovery?)
  
  By what process is this being developed? Is there a site, mailing lists, etc., for it?
  
  I’m minded by what I can do with my iPhone and Apple TV today, in that I can use the iPhone as a remote control for the Apple TV: this allows both navigation (i.e., by dragging the touchscreen), and also searching the on-device catalogue, viewing artwork, and so on (very similar to the in-built iPod application’s interface, but obviously operates on the remote device). Additionally, it pops up the iPhone OS keyboard interface whenever the Apple TV needs text input—e.g., for searching YouTube, entering WiFi passwords, etc.
  
  A protocol flexible enough to support these various different things—and beyond—could well be much bigger than the applications the BBC has in mind, and really deserves wider input and audience!
• The Ingex Project- an Introduction 3:35pm on 19 Nov 2009 For those of us who left the horrors of CVS behind years ago, I’ve set up a github mirror of the repository on SourceForge:
  
  In theory, this should be updated within an hour of changes being committed. That said, I’ve never done a CVS⟷git bridge before (only Subversion and Mercurial), so it’s entirely possible it will all go horribly wrong!
  

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