10 questions to Michael Sparks, OS Guru at BBC (Part 2)

Part 1 of the article was published yesterday.

The following answers must be construed generally as personal opinions and preconceptions, and not in any shape or form an official BBC position. Michael Sparks does not speak for the BBC here despite working there, and despite speaking on behalf of the BBC at Linux World London.

6. How receptive and supportive was the BBC when Open source was first introduced to the organisation? Did you meet with any obstacles?

I wasn't working with the BBC when open source was first introduced or when the BBC first released some software as open source. It was probably introduced in several areas independently in different ways by people who didn't know that other people were using open source software in the organisation.

By the time I joined - 4 years ago - the BBC had been using Apache, Perl, Linux & Wikis in lots of locations for many years. The most notable piece of open source that the BBC had released at that point was a tool called "BETSIE" which produces text only versions of web pages (as used on the news web pages amongst others) and that had been released as open source many years ago.

However, when I joined the BBC, there was a definite move inside BBC R&D (as it was called then) by a moderate number of engineers to look to see whether what we were developing could or should be released as open source (However, as far as I'm aware nothing had been formally released as open source at that time by BBC R&D).

As a result when we started work on Kamaelia, I was in the right place at the right time - my immediate management was extremely supportive, and Kamaelia was started on the understanding that the project would be released as open source when there was a core that could be released.

When the time came for release however, there was an interesting issue. The only project that BBC Research had released in a manner with buy-in from senior management as open source at that point in time was Dirac. At that point in time the licensing fees for MPEG-4 hadn't stablised and it was looking like it would be hideously expensive for broadcasters, and the opportunity to take Dirac further for independent standardisation allowing the industry to effectively "start again" was appealing (at least this is my understanding).

Some people took this release of Dirac as the BBC going "we're going into head to head competition with X", since that makes a good story, when in fact we'd've been delighted if the people who were claimed to be competing with us collaborated with us. Most notably it was a news report around Linux World that caused the biggest problems due to the misconception by the media of the BBC seeking to compete rather collaborate.

As a result when Kamaelia came to be released, the release process was paused while some formal criterion were drawn up - based on the experience (good and bad) with Dirac. After this Kamaelia was measured against those. This took a rather long period of time since the BBC does recognise that once you've released, you've released - it can't be clawed back. This was frustrating on a personal level, but makes sense on an organisational level.

Since then the level of support I have had from the organisation has been great. When we needed a contributor agreement for accepting contributions from the community for example, our legal team were great and extremely supportive. Coming from an internet and open source background it took longer than I anticipated, but in retrospect no longer than it would normally take in any public organisation.