On 01/08/07, Christopher Woods <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > maybe the BBC were just realists when it came to the > practicalities of development cost versus ROI from creating versions for > (EXTREMELY) minority OSes? I mean, come on, hands up who here on the list > uses Linux as their primary OS.
me as well (as if you couldn't have guessed). Why in your statistics did you neglect things like Java and Python? They may not be OSes themselves but they provide an abstraction to the OS in much the same way as OSes themselves provide an abstraction to the hardware. For instance you would say develop for "Java", not "Java on WinXP" as Java provides portable hooks into the parts of the OS you need (which technically you can bypass and go direct to the OS but that's going out of your way to make a non platform neutral implementation). Only thing Java, Python and other such systems is they don't seem to get around the platform dependence of the OS. Luckily there is a whole lot of people who may write the installer for you (provided you open source the code), how helpful of them! Or you can develop for a standardised OS, (e.g. POSIX). Code for POSIX then just recompile with the correct cross compiler and it will run on any POSIX conforming OS for which you can find a cross compiler (or you could install the OS and do a native compile). Now the POSIX argument is much closer to that of PAL. POSIX is actually a standard, many OS manufacturers implement it, and any OS manufacturer can implement it if they choose! So BBC choose to develop for a standard, POSIX there. > Percentages speak a lot to people signing off on cheques to fund development > lifecycles... The BBC was set up up so that we had a broadcaster who was not tied to such commercial pressures, evidently the BBC is disregarding the reason it was created! And as I have pointed out several times, where do you get the idea that it costs more to develop for extra OSes? You develop cross platform from day one. You don't have to spend 3 times the money for 3 OSes. Most code in C works on all platforms, why would it have to be written again and thus cost more? And if you want maximum Return On Investment then here's an even cheaper method to get cross-platform vendor neutral and all the other goodness. Define a specification (you would normally do this anyway, otherwise you need to have server and client teams working too closely), make sure everything is defined and then publish it fully. Write the Server side of the application, (You would have had to do this anyway) Now BBC, you stop, your job is done. Community people can take over and build clients, people get a choice of clients, if there is demand on a specific platform it gets built otherwise it doesn't (nice way to work out how much demand there really is for different platforms ;)) And you get the advantage of seeing all the innovative idea people come up with. Would this appeal to the people on this list? You could then actually "Mash Up" BBC content, putting it in software that works the way you want it to and making your own better software if the current offerings are not good enough. Currently the BBC won't let anyone even touch the way iPlayer works, oddly they consider it "theirs", ignoring the fact that the UK License Payer payed for it, not just BBC employees who get the right to do what they want with it (regardless of what your regulators, or the law tells you to do). Oh and anyone got the UK statistics on Firefox usage? Is that a small enough to be discriminated against? Precisely how small does a group need to be before it becomes morally justified to discriminate against it? Anyway consider the above idea, maybe for iPlayer, or if not some other project, it would be an interesting experiment would it not? Let's get back to an innovative BBC we used to have, remember the days when the BBC where proud to do things others didn't. (Sorry reminiscing about Walking With Dinosaurs, truly ground breaking when that came out, pity the BBC won't do new innovative things any more, preferring to copy other channels, iPlayer is not innovative in the least, it's like 40D, only later and still in Beta). Andy PS: Didn't find the article I _know_ I saw but this is close enough: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070717-europeans-embrace-firefox-in-record-numbers.html 18.7% Firefox usage in the UK (and that's not counting the other browsers). First hit on Google I got for "uk web browser statistics" (note: may not be first for you, google personalises searches) provides some more stats: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp Appears somewhere in the region of 40% of people aren't using IE. It's OK to discriminate against 40% of people? No one else thinks that's wrong? -- Computers are like air conditioners. Both stop working, if you open windows. -- Adam Heath - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
