File under: about bloody time! The BBC has, at long, long last, released an iPlayer beta which supports both Linux and Mac users.

The new BBC iPlayer went live at around 5.00pm today...the streaming service is for all, whatever OS you’re using, as long as it’s got Flash support.

Just hours after the BBC said it had fixed the iPlayer streamed TV service to prevent DRM-free file downloads, a London-based programmer has bypassed the new protection.

The BBC Trust has responsibility for ensuring that the correct degree of scrutiny is given to all proposals from the BBC Executive for new services (such as the iPlayer) and any significant changes to existing services.In the case of the iPlayer, following the consultation, the Trust noted the strong public demand for the service to be available on a variety of operating systems.

The Open Source Consortium has welcomed the BBC's move to make its iPlayer online on-demand TV service available for streaming on operating systems other than Microsoft Windows.

The BBC Trust has asked to meet open source advocates to discuss their complaints over the corporation's Windows-only on demand broadband TV service, iPlayer.

Mozilla's Plugin Check development team have updated the Plugin Check service, adding support for a number of other browsers, including Safari 4, Chrome 4, Opera 10.5 and basic support for Internet Explorer 7 and 8

"...So, the question of the day is how long service providers will be tolerated as open source vacuums. The Free Software Foundation avoided this issue with GPLv3 but has produced the Affero General Public License (AGPL) to cover the use of code that's delivered over a network, as opposed to on disk or by download as in the past.

The BBC has been accused of forcing people to use Microsoft operating systems and has been threatened with a complaint to the European Commission. The charge concerns the use of Microsoft technology in the corporation's forthcoming iPlayer.