Good 'ol BBC does it again

Despite some of its recent failings, the BBC is still one of those institutions that retains some concept of public service. Recently it announced plans to release huge amounts of material into the public domain (see my earlier article
http://www.towlson.com/weblog1/archives/000050.html"> here

As a further contribution to Open Culture, the BBC is now developing code-decode (codec) software in an open-source project aimed at providing a royalty-free way to distribute video. I found the news here but I am sure it appears elsewhere.

The Dirac codec project seems to be managing to navigate the treacherous waters of intellectual property and will infringe no patents. This means that it will be freely available worldwide for any platform including Linux and the Mac OS as well as Microsoft Windows.

It is good to hear of ways in which our cultural heritage will be accessible to us without the control of proprietary software and restrictive licences.