Democracy means, at least for me, the right to choose - also - to choose the OS I am running. How could EU dprive people of their democratic rights? Welcome back to the "dark ages"
As a European citizen who only uses Linux at home why am I unable to access the same material as other citizens? Am I not to be allowed to see this material? Does this mean that I have to purchase American Software in order to see European Information. This is an undemocratic and quite silly stance for the Council to take. It is in fact indefensible
Why locking out users from watching democratic processes and locking the system in to a proprietary, controversial software vendor seems to be a good decision is beyond me. But someone must have agreed to this plan, as it seems.
I'm a recognised Ubuntu Member and am on the staff team at ubuntuforums.org
This technology is so easy to do using open formats, I cannot understand the "legality".
Not using an open codec for official EU broadcasts is against so much of what they stand for. Using a proprietary format is outrageous! It compromizes many peoples ability to gather this information and will make the organization loose parts of its trustworthyness.
I don't understand what legal reason there could possibly be for this? There are many cross-platform formats to use, some of them open source. How hard can it be? Please explain the legal basis of your non-linux support
I'm an EU citizen, I have a right to accessthe information generated by my representatives,and as my representatives you do not have theright to deny me access.
If yourchosen technology doesn't allow me to accessthe information, you need to choose a technologythat does.
There are many legal codecs for linux. The opinion expressed by the low-level bureaucrats at the EU is based on lazy opinion and not fact. The lazy bureaucrats have used patent-encumbered compression and encoding to bind the public's content. At least stop being lazy and spend some cheap CPU cycles on reformating the content in unencumbered formats.
Why should the EU promote MS or Apple, both american corporations. Sounds like corruption to me! Use ogg theora to promote democracy and to show some goddamned backbone!
The Internet was invented as a platform-independent medium. That's a large part of the reason it thrives. Please try to support vendor-neutral technologies so as not to show favoritism toward companies with monopolistic practices.
There's no reason why a patent-free streaming video format could _not_ be used, apart from incompetence on the IT side. Wake up, EU! I'll let you find what this patent-free video format is.
Bloquer l'accès à la vidéo en ligne aux internautes équipés de Linux est antidémocratique. Il existe des formats vidéo standard — le MPEG-4 par exemple et de meilleure qualité — qui peuvent fort bien être utilisés à la place du WMV.
I'm an EU citizen, I have a right to access the information generated by my representatives, and as my representatives you do not have the right to deny me access.
If your chosen technology doesn't allow me to access the information, you need to choose a technology that does.
It's completely possible to support all operating systems; if it was not the law would need to be changed anyway ! Can you imagine a democratic institution not having the 'commercial' right to communicate with its citizens ? Refuse the FUD from microsoft, refuse to force us to buy locked down products !
"We cannot support Linux in a legal way." Why? Just change your service to work with standards so you can do because you MUST and you should. Please do things properly.
If you cannot support linux in any "legal" way, then please change some laws so you can. It only shows that the laws, if this is really true, are broken. Or is the EU so powerless that it cannot even do this?
What interest is there for a government to restrict the dissemination of their deliberations? Make it open, or turn off the service and fall back to paper.
This is why we need a constitution for the eu! One part of it could be an act "freedom of information". That would force them to offer other technologies (perhaps open ones).
