Michael: Email sent, thanks for the comments. To say I wanted you to be someone I could listen to the audience rant at is a step too far, just that I clearly had preconceived notions of what I thought would happen and struggled with the difference. Thanks again for the talk and all the best for Kamaelia and other projects – needless to say I’ll attend future talks with a different frame of mind!

“Anyway I was talking with Jono about how great it would be if one of you guys would be willing to come to LugRadio this year to do a talk on BBC open source projects such as Dirac and Kamaelia.”

Last year at Linux world I gave a fairly wide ranging, but non-technical talk on Open Source at the BBC 2 days in a row, and then a repeat of the same talk at Cambridge University. The difference between the two audiences was stark – it was perfect for the Linux World audience, and at Cambridge Uni a number of the people in the audience were project originators (eg Exim). Giving that talk at Linux World felt perfectly sensible at the latter it felt *a lot* like I was preaching to the converted – or teaching them to suck eggs.

Anyway, I chatted with Christian afterwards and he suggested that the LUG Radio crowd prefer something more practical, so I’d decided ages back that I was going to talk about Kamaelia (as suggested anyway!).

I’m not sure how it disappeared into the ether, but I’d even sent (back in April) Jono a title for the talk called: “Behold: A Shrubbery! It’s power? A Toy Box For Trivial Concurrency.” which is rather whimsical, and is a play on the fact that Kamaelia is a deliberate misspelling of Camellia – which is a flowering shrubbery (Camellia Sinesis is Tea BTW). A shrubbery because its written in python.

Immediately after that I did also say:
“If you want a serious title we could also use the more boring: “BBC Open Source Projects”"

No conspiracy theories necessary

As for iPlayer – I share your concerns and everyone elses. The machines I use all run linux, except for the PPC based Mac Mini I bought a couple of years back to act as a headless server (since they’re next to silent and are essentially just Unix boxes with a bling front end). Why a Mac Mini? I had nowhere to put a noisy machine and needed something next to silent. It’s handy as a test box for kamaelia on Mac OS X too.

As a result, I can’t use iPlayer, and won’t be able to unless it becomes truly cross platform and supports Linux, Mac OS X, etc as well as older versions of windows, and provides a mechanism for solaris and the BSDs etc of the world.

On a completely personal note I don’t agree with all the decisions they’ve taken, but I don’t work on the iPlayer project, and have no influence over it whatsoever. A number of components in Kamaelia are aimed at providing tools that could be used to build an open/cross platform iPlayer – after all we can capture what’s broadcast, chunk into programmes, and have integration of components for distribution (bit torrent, multicast etc). However without a cross platform DRM mechanism, its extremely unlikely to happen, but who knows.

Also, it didn’t even cross my mind to talk about iPlayer. Best case everyone would’ve been bored an frustrated by me talking about it because it’s not my project and it’d be second hand or here-say. Worst case I would’ve been facing an angry audience who’d want to rant at me about iPlayer simply because I work at the BBC. I’m personally not interested in that because quite frankly I’ve expressed my concerns to people inside the BBC which reflect the same concerns that would’ve been raised.

I’d no more want a large number of rants about a project I don’t work on or have _any_ influence over on a Sunday morning, than an audience wants to have me teaching them to suck eggs. Talking about a project that helps you build your own P2P radio system, record stuff off the TV and makes concurrency easier to work with and also shows how open source can help research get out of the lab into use inside the BBC, changing perspectives struck me as far more worthwhile.

On a more positive note, it sounded like you wanted me to be someone you (or the audience) could rant at about iPlayer and instead got an interesting talk that you’ve said some nice things about despite yourself. I’ll take that as success

Your mileage may vary

I’m forgotten already and I haven’t even started yet :’(

Anyway, thank you for coming and I’m glad you enjoyed it, the idea is for LRL to be very much a community event rather than a purely technical thing that only uber-geeks will understand. A lot of people put put in a lot of hard work to make it a fun weekend for everybody so its nice to hear that we succeeded.

See you in the states