The West Australian are having a competition - subscribe to their daily news feed on your desktop and you get the chance to win a Dell laptop. The advertisement has the RSS logo in it, so silly me, I thought it might’ve been an RSS feed.
I went to the website and clicked on the RSS logo. It didn’t open my feed reader. It took me to another page that asked me to download their program. "This program works on Windows PCs only".
Not only is it wrong not to provide versions for other platforms (or a single version that works on multiple platforms, e.g. a Flash movie-based aggregator), but it’s also wrong to use the RSS logo when talking about their news feed. The feed is locked to a proprietary program - you cannot look at the source code of the feed, nor access it from any other program - so the logo is being used in reference to a closed format. Mozilla’s guidelines for use of the RSS logo clearly state that it "should be used to indicate the presence of information provided via web syndication in an open format…".
By "Open format", the Mozilla Foundation define that, among other things, it should be "free of legal restrictions on use, especially restrictions
that would prevent the format from being implemented by free and
open source software". Finding the actual location of the feed file and reading it would require reverse-engineering or decompiling of the software, both of which are prohibited by the EULA of the software.
I did try running the distasteful program in WINE, but the windows would not render properly no matter what settings I used.
I hope I’m still bloody registered to win the laptop.
Entries (RSS)