I have become a semi-frequently watcher of Channel Five’s ‘The Gadget Show’ (Fridays 7.30pm and repeated later that night, FYI). They’ve covered some interesting topics this series, and by and large their reviews have been interesting, although they have a tendency to try and do too much in a review, which has sometimes negated it’s usefulness.
This past Friday, as also commented by davee, they did a feature on Open Source software, also backed up by a short piece on their website by one of the presenters. They did try and cover an awful lot, looking at OSS on Windows, and and almost throwaway mentions of Linux, and they did suggest that OSS == free, which some of us will recognise as slightly incorrect, but ultimately it was interesting to see what an ‘outsider’ view was.
In comparison to the BBCs review in Click Online, I think they did a really good job. They mentioned all of the ‘big’ mainstay projects (OpenOffice.org, Firefox, Thunderbird and The GIMP), and it was great to see someone mention Knoppix as a way of trying Linux without installing. It was a shame they didn’t look at a couple of distributions, but, then again, their method was probably best for their target audience.
However, probably the best part about the review, can be summed up in some quotes from the online article:
- “And while I maintain that you need to have a certain level of technical knowledge to install something like the £35 Suse Linux, it offers so much for so little, it might actually be worth asking someone else to install it for you.”
- “Why change? How about ‘it’s fun to try something new?’”
- “But I’m in favour of the ‘give it a try because it’s different’ argument.”
The underlying theme of the review was that you might as well give OSS a try, because it’s not going to cost you anything to do so. Well done Channel 5 
mrBen