STE WILLIAMS

Disney sitcom says open source is insecure

Shake it Up, a Disney sitcom that screens on The Disney Channel around the world, has slipped in an insult to open source software.

The show, which tracks the activities of a group of aspiring dancers on a TV show called “Shake it Up, Chicago”, appears to be aimed at tweens. We make that assertion based on the age of comments on its web site, the brightly-coloured costumes and stereotypical big-brush-strokes characters.

In the offending episode one such character, a squeaky-voiced, glasses-and-argyle-jumper-wearing kid who is clearly meant to be a nerd, is asked to fix another character’s stricken computer.

His diagnostic repartee sees him ask:

“Did you use open source code to save time, and the virus was hidden in it?”

Upon winning a grudging admission that this course of action was indeed was the cause of digital malaise, the nerd replies that using open source in this way was a “rookie mistake”.

Purloined YouTube footage of the incident is already available, here and below.

Disney will doubtless cause its erasure within moments, so we grabbed a screen shot of the annoying kid to give you the flavour of the show.

Pre-teen sysadmin on the Disney show Shake it Up

Freetards are, at the time of writing, yet to erupt in protest, but that can’t be far off.

In a company the size of Disney it is understandable that the left hand sometimes scarcely knows the other even exists, so there is a jolly good chance this all happened without any knowledge that Disney-owned Pixar recently released some of its production code under an open source licence. ®

Watch Video

Article source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2012/08/20/disney_sitcom_open_source_insecure/

Comments are closed.