Canada's CBC - Powered By OSS

Otter Escaping North writes "Blake Crosby's Under the Hood column on CBC's website recently discussed how almost the entire site is powered by open source software. It's great to see a government-funded agency making frugal technology decisions, and even better to see them trumpeting the benefits of doing so."

Comments

Hardly Praise

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's consider the source... It's the CBC. they have one of the lowest ratings of all networks in Canada. They lost the bid to broadcast the 2010 Olympics (which are in Canada), they lost the rights to broadcast the Briar (Curling). Their last truly big hit was "The Beachcombers", or at least nothing has come close since. (Maybe "Corner Gas" will do it).

  - I would be hard pressed to count this as praise for OSS when the CBC has no idea what they're doing in almost every other department.

Re:Hardly Praise

[hey!]

I don't know about CBC, but you could say similar things about public television in the US, which is mainly privately funded. Public TV doesn't have the ratings.

But...

Most of the innovation in television programming in the US comes out of PBS.

Would there be a cooking channel without Julia Child? Home improvement shows without This Old House and Crockett's Victory Garden? The History Channel without a long tradition of shows like The American Experience and of course Ken Burns Civil war? A Disocvery Channel without Nova? Even reality TV shows have their origins in public broadcasting (albeit the PBS versions were considerably more high brow).

Sure, you may like Discovery Channel better than Nova (I don't), but the fact is people don't invest in something like that until the know it's going to be popular.

Somebody has to dare to be unpopular, even if it's because they're stuffy and pretentious.

Re:Now for the media content

[Anonymous Coward]

Now if only radio3.cbc.ca (Microsoft-IIS/6.0, ASP.NET) could break the damn flash habit they'd be fine.

Also, www.cbc.ca (Apache/1.3.29 (Linux/SUSE) mod_gzip/1.3.26.1a mod_jk/1.2.6-dev) has changed dramatically in the last year, the page is now dominated by advertisements where previously there were none, and at the expense of content. It has lost the professional look it had, it now gives the impression of something like an ISP homepage instead of a national news agency.

Also an auto refresh on a main page is a really bad idea. I'll reload the content when I choose to thanks. A year or two ago they merged their Science section into their Health section - bye bye quality science journalism, I don't care about every little bogus money making scheme of the health industry, I want to see real science stories.

[rant]Same thing happening to Discovery's Daily Planet with Jay Ingram (former CBC radio guy) when they foisted off Natasha Stillwell on the show to give it that pop science edge to appeal to women and children.

David Suzuki is treated as some kind of eco-terrorist now... The modern media is in dire need of some quality science journalism, when Newscientist and Nature are considered authoritative sources, the end is near. Damn it, maybe I should just go start my own real science news site that is not driven by populism.[/rant]

I applaud the use of FreeBSD-Postfix mailservers, but stuff like Tomcat (java is evil) and Wordpress (cookie-cutter insecure cms) make me want to puke.

All right!

[FlyByPC]

Any site that not only uses open-source, but has cool games like Sushi Samurai is OK in my book!

(...even if the game is a shameless clone of BurgerTime with different sprites. Using Wasabi as a weapon is just too cool for words.)