Canvas draws more fire
September 13, 2010
The fifth complaint to Ofcom about Project Canvas has arrived from The Open Source Consortium (OSC), a group made up of comprising SME providers of services and support based on open standards. The OSC, which represent 25 or so mainly consultants, is unhappy that Canvas isn’t “open” in the same way Linux is regarded as “open”.
In its complaint it says the OSC “believes that genuinely open standards bring many benefits to all levels of society, most obviously by lowering barriers to entry in a given market as a result of increasing standardisation and interoperability. Project Canvas is not “open” in any sense of the term as recognised by the OSC. As such, the OSC believes Project Canvas will have adverse consequences for the device and software sector, diminishing consumer choice and causing inevitable consumer harm. This will be the result of the BBC and its joint venture partners limiting technology choice, setting arbitrary access conditions and enforcing mandated branding decisions.
The technology choices by the BBC and its partners are discriminatory, creating an unfair and unjustified barrier to the consumer’s choice of software installed on a device used for ‘content consumption’”.