The San Francisco Community Colo, where our servers are co-located, has launched a new website based on Trac, an open source project management application that was written for free software projects. SFCCP demonstrates how open source programming techniques are being applied to real-life organizations. One noteworthy innovation is that everything happening within SFCCP is transparent — keeping track of what people are doing and why they’re doing it is inherent to the software. Wouldn’t it be amazing if this level of insight was available for, say, your local monopoly electricity company? Or your city government? It’s possible that free software can bring a revolutionary change in what expectations the public has for services they pay for and especially for organizations that are supposed to represent us.

Apparently, the BBC has made some back-room deals with Microsoft that caught the attention of the Free Software Foundation. The BBC’s iPlayer application was developed exclusively for Windows and uses Microsoft’s Digital Rights Management. I’m not exactly clear about the BBC’s relationship with the British government but the FSF had this to say: “Licence fee payers must now own a Microsoft operating system to download BBC programming.”