“Message 10 – posted by Officer Dibble ( , 1 Hour Ago

so in other words, back to the status before Nick got involved, and the whole of his reason d’etre for culling the boards has amounted to nothing… excpet we have less boards and traffic is down and people have left.”

your plans are a mess you should be ashamed”

So far the biggest complaints I’ve seen are that the Trust is making the right decisions for the wrong reasons—it could always be the other way around!

It’s true that there are some new things in the Guidelines. But I think the fuss about them is more about the current atmosphere around the BBC than anything else.

A lot of your post suggests that a wiki which had the old version in it for easy comparison’s sake would at least have helped the journalists get their facts right

I will be continuing to delete any comments from you on my personal blog from now on.

http://nevali.net/post/162726923/c

There is (as it’s been part of ongoing discussions!) a -huge- gulf between open source “content” (i.e., liberally-licensed for reuse, possibly modification, etc.) and open source *software* being able to access the output of the BBC (whether it’s as legally-protected as they come or less so isn’t really important).

The former is a debate broadly centred upon who “owns” the content, and whether the license-fee paying public should be able to get more out of it than they traditionally have. It’s interesting, and there’s some cool stuff you can do (though more where the metadata’s concerned than the content itself), but it’s not going change the landscape of broadcasting; it’s just another a way to engage the audience, really.

The latter is more critical: the BBC has, where terrestrial transmissions in the UK is conerned, always been agnostic. Free-to-air meant free-to-air. The BBC had no _reason_ to care what goes on inside a TV or STB, and what kind of software it’s powered by.

Once you start introducing a licensing regime for CE manufacturers and making it so that (for legal reasons) ONLY licensed equipment can realise the full benefits of the broadcasts, you’ve not only ditched FTA, but plumped yourself squarely in an incredibly complex landscape. This is something most broadcasters have avoided at any cost, because it’s quite honestly a nightmare (as you are, to an extent, discovering this week).

Now, back to the first part: the broadcast industry is changing and becoming liberalised, albeit slowly. The technology is becoming simpler, Internet distribution is becoming realistic, and a pro-DSLR can shoot HD video.

On the one hand, there’s a legal and regulatory regime which specifies what you can and can’t broadcast and conditions placed upon advertising (and soon this will be sorted out properly so that it applies to Internet-delivered broadcasts just the same as it does to terrestrial, cable and satellite).

But, taking this into account, there’s a very slow and quiet revolution brewing, where broadcasting increasingly becoming contingent _only_ on skill, time, and effort, rather than all of those plus vast sums of money. None of this will compete with the major broadcasters in any mainstream way (at least, not for a couple of decades), but change is definitely afoot. For the upstarts, the need to recoup the huge costs involved in producing output is a non-issue—they’re just doing it principally because they _can_. Creative Commons is doing some great work in helping to sort out an appropriate licensing regime for it.

As small as this competition is, right now, it’s still legitimate competition, and the the BBC needs to be extremely careful that its actions aren’t viewed by the Trust or the regulator as being wilfully anti-competitive with respect to it (which is part of why Project Canvas, as proposed, is incredibly risky—the other part begins with “M” and ends in “urdoch”).

I know a few folk within the BBC are sitting and watching with interest as it all slowly unfolds. I don’t know what the upper echelons of management think privately, though. I suspect some might be quite fearful of the possible implications of not having the scarcity of spectrum to rely upon to keep competitors at bay.