17Oct

The BBC’s open source rules

posted by Steve Bowbrick

In ten or fifteen years, when the BBC has finally been translated from a dark brown top-down industrial-era content funnel into a glittering archipelago composed of pure energy (you know what I mean) we’ll look back on this document as a kind of magna carta of openness, a foundation document for the new republic of shared knowledge that the BBC will help to found.

It’s an unprepossessing document, not a constitution or a charter, just the simple rules that software developers at the BBC have to observe when thinking about releasing their code under an open source licence. And it’s not a generous document either: rather compromised in fact. Software may only be released if:

  • The software must have no or negligible commercial application or value, and is unlikely, if licensed, to bring revenue back to the BBC.
  • The software is ‘non-mission critical’, and there are not likely to be any competitive uses of the software which might enable a third party to profit from the BBC’s investment.

And it must not be released if:

  • The software would otherwise give the BBC a direct competitive advantage that it would lose following such release.

But reassuringly, neither should it be released if:

  • The quality of the software is appropriate for the BBC’s internal purposes but does not meet external standards.

So hardly a declaration of independence or a communist manifesto. In fact the rules make it explicit: BBC developers may release only good but rather unimportant code into the world. The rules are a good expression of a certain first generation timidity in the release of code and I’d like to think that the next revision will scrap the requirement for code to have “no commercial application or value”.

I don’t want to overstate the importance of this document (it’s really just part of one BBC department’s process) but these rules are fascinating because they seem to capture the final moments of the closed era, the era during which it was appropriate to develop rich and useful code (in a public service setting) while withholding it from reuse and extension in the wider community and economy.

The full set of rules are here. Thanks again to Rob Hardy for sending them to me. If you know of other rules like these or of code or content that are being released by the BBC under similar or different terms, do let me know.