The BBC will shut the “minority of consumers who either do not use Microsoft or do not have an up-to-date Microsoft operating system” out of its new on-line, on-demand services, according to proposals put up for public comment by the British broadcaster.

The restriction is driven by DRM concerns as the BBC outlines in a weighty (652KB) PDF of its new plans. It intends to place all content on the net for seven days after the initial broadcast, so that users can “catch-up” on shows they have missed.

But it won’t be a free-for-all:

In respect of the seven-day catch-up over the internet service, the files would require DRM to ensure that they were appropriately restricted in terms of time and geographic consumption. The only system that currently provides this security is Windows Media 10 and above. Further, the only comprehensively deployed operating system that currently supports Windows Media Player 10 and above is the Windows XP operating system. As a result of these DRM requirements the proposed BBC iPlayer download manager element therefore requires Windows Media Player 10 and Windows XP. This means the service would be unavailable to a minority of consumers who either do not use Microsoft or do not have an up-to-date Microsoft operating system.

Mac users (and others) will take some comfort from hopes of a less proprietary future:

However, over time, technology improvements are likely to enable even more efficient methods of delivery. Further, it is our understanding the BBC Executive are working towards the iPlayer download manager being able to function on other operating systems.

If you have strong views about these things or simply like your media free of proprietary constrictions, the BBC welcomes comments .

[Via Boing-Boing -- Thanks, Conrad]

UPDATE: According to fifthdecade, who posts in the comments below,

Microsoft are getting a 2 year exclusivity deal which they haven’t paid for. It’s a scandal! That alone must be worth millions to Microsoft if next year’s Premier League football TV coverage is worth £600 million!

Read more on his blog.microsoft, DRM, BBC, cross-platform, media player, data security, apple, linux

Remember a few months ago there was an apparent stampede of people, headed by Mark Pilgrim, who were abandoning Macs for Ubuntu? (Although some later came back.)

Java podcaster Tim Shadel is going the other way , dumping Ubuntu after using Linux for years and stretching his legs into Mac OS X.

Since Mail.app was the straw that broke the camel’s back for Mark Pilgrim, it’s extra interesting to read Tim’s experience with Mail, compared to Evolution, his Linux mail client:

Mail.app is great. Evolution almost works. I have to use exchange at work (I have Ubuntu installed there, too). Evolution has a module to integrate with Exchange, and it sorta thinks about working. It’s slow, and frequently it hangs. So much so that I got sick of typing

ps -ef | grep evolu | grep -v grep | awk ‘{ print $2 }’ | xargs kill

that I put it in a batch file shell script. I ran it no less than twice a day, sometimes more. Calendaring almost worked, except when it didn’t. Frequently I’d send out an appointment only to figure out that my colleagues version of the appointment didn’t repeat over the right interval. I don’t blame anyone for having trouble integrating with a Microsoft product. But at the end of the day, it was still annoyingly brittle. On Mac, there’s Entourage — an M$ product to work with the M$ server. As it is, Mail.app rocks for processing my personal email really efficiently. Oh, and it can export your mail to mbox. Duh. On Ubuntu, mail almost works.

He goes on to list many more ways in which Mac OS X simply provides a superior user experience—searching, wireless, GUI, audio effects, bluetooth and more.

In the end, it’s all about an OS that (wait for it…) “just works”:

My reasons for choosing to dump Ubuntu for a Mac are almost entirely about the experience. After years of Linux work, I’m tired of fiddling. I’m tired of things that almost work. I’m ready for a change. I’m sick of the war to get things to work. I’m ready to simply Get Things Done.

mail.app, apple mail, switching, Mac osx, linux, ubuntu, apple, open-source

KMail users looking to switch to Apple Mail now have a smarter tool to help make the transition.

Last year a poster on macOSXHints provided a script for importing KMail mailboxes into Mail.

Now another poster has produced an updated script that preserves the time stamp on the original emails.mail.app, apple mail, kmail, linux, switching, mailboxes, importing

Remember O’Reilly big hitter Allison Randal and her overflowing inbox?

She’s decided to try stemming the flow with Mail.app and MailTags and Mail Act-on , two of the very best plugins for Apple Mail.

It is interesting to see what she discovers and whether she is hopeful that it will be enough to meet the challenge of her 20,000 email inboxes. Interesting too to ponder whether better tools can beat a cultural problem.

Two things at least are better than she holds out. Emails can be tagged with rules in mail.app, so manual tagging is not the only way to bring some order into your data. And the public beta of MailTags does bring reliable syncing of IMAP tags between more than one Mac.

I think, though, that even the most partisan MailTagger would have to concede her other point. You do need to use a Mac to enjoy the plugin’s benefits.

I wonder if Scott is secretly working away on an Outlook or Thunderbird version? mail.app, apple mail, productivity, mailtags, mail act-on, plugins, inbox of doom, mutt, linux

A month ago Tim Bray and Mark Pilgrim torched off a mini-firestorm in the blogosphere by announcing that they were switching away from Mac OS X to Ubuntu.

Hawk Wings covered it because of Mail.app’s central role in Mark Pilgrim’s decision to switch away.

Now Tim Bray is almost having second thoughts. He has posted a list of things that Mac OS X does better and things that Ubuntu does better. Mac OS X wins out in some important areas.

Mail.app and iCal don’t fare so well though:

I have so had it with Apple applications. A couple weeks with Thunderbird made it obvious I should have long since dumped Mail.app. Every week iCal gets slower and every week I hate it more. When I was on Ubuntu, I maintained my schedule by typing it into a plain-text document in Emacs, and that was so much less painful.

No love lost there!

Given that the Mac vs. Ubuntu debate got caught up in the unrelated “proprietary vs. open format” issue, perhaps the most interesting sentence in the post is this:

now that I’ve realized that I can have a decent application suite that doesn’t lock up my data and runs on whatever OS/Hardware, my desire to get off the Mac has moderated.

ubuntu, linux, mac OS X, Apple, Mac, mail.app, apple mail, ical, switching

The Apple and open source / open file format debate continues.

Tim Bray, Director of Web Technologies at Sun Microsystems, made a contribution that drew some attention. He is going to switch to Linux.

Rui Carmo at Tao of Mac also has some interesting things to say. He argues that Open Format is the real issue here, not open-sourced apps.

Still, he can’t help wondering if,

… Mail.app (for one) wouldn’t be considerably better than it currently is if its core bits had half the exposure that WebKit has, or if iChat would have had a chance to evolve to become the standards-uncompliant mess that it is if it were based off Gaim or, better still, the odd-named application that replaced Gnomemeeting.

I have a feeling that they would at least be more interoperable with other stuff, which entails having the decency of supporting IMAP IDLE and SIP/H.323 properly – and hopefully causing considerably less pain to their users.

Making Mail.app more open to developers was one of the key desires that emerged from the “Talking Mail.app” interviews with John Gruber, Merlin Mann, Scott Morrison, drunkenbatman, Leander Kahney, Brent Simmons, et al.

Of course, wishing don’t make it so, but it’s still fun to wonder.

What if?open source, open format, apple, linux, mail.app, apple mail, imap

Novell’s Evolution 2.6 has been ported to the Mac.

Evolution is a integrated mail, calendar and address book suite that usually runs under Linux on Gnome desktops.

The Mac OS X port, which will work on Panther or Tiger, runs by connecting to the XServer and uses X11 for display.

You can get the latest built from the Novell web site .

[Thanks, Jeff]evolution, novell, mac port, email, x11, Xdarwin, linux