Accept no substitutes

Day: August 22, 2007

LATimes:Let us make this perfectly clear — NOT

The Michael Skube LATimes oped saga continues just when it seemed to be somewhat resolved.

Jay Rosen’s Blowback piece just out answers Skube’s charges against bloggers handily and Jay used crowdsourcing in the blogosphere to produce and factcheck the article. It’s solid work.

But as they say in the news biz, questions remain.

Skube has admitted that he had at best a passing knowledge of the existence of TalkingPointsMemo. He said that references to TMP were added to his article by editors at the LATimes.

Based on this note at the LATimes site (not linked from the Rosen article BTW) that may be the case.

Or is it? We know, now forced into the odd task of parsing the note, that Skube agreed with an editor at the LATimes that “it would be helpful to include the names of the bloggers in [his] piece as active participants in political debate.” No telling who did the choosing and the adding from this though.

Did the LATimes editor add TPM or did Skube? Or does it matter? To the last, responsibility does matter in responsible journalism. “Mistakes were made” will not do.

Note: This blog was sourced in Jay Rosen’s article.

Release the MainActor Code

Joey, who writes well and wisely about Video on Linux, alerts us to an effort to get MainActor’s code released as official development has been discontinued.

MainActor, a commercial product for video editing on a Linux platform, has been discontinued. This means that the source code could potentially be made open-source. A petition is circulating to encourage MainConcept to consider releasing at least some of their code.

A similar initiative was started by the Blender Foundation many years ago, and they successfully bought the source code for something like a hundred thousand euros, and then released it as open source.

MainActor has always been a well reviewed product, although the price tag was generally too much for many people. A source code release from MainConcept would come in the form of a partial code base, with their proprietary encoding technology removed. An effort would need to be made to replace those parts with something like libavcodec. If Blender is a good model, the process will be slow, but the potential for an active community is vast. Today Blender has one of the largest, most enthusiastic, and fastest growing user communities out there.

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