The Challenges of Public Code: Building an Open Source Culture at BBC
Talkat OSPOCon @ Open Source Summit Europe 2024 · on Tuesday, 2024-09-17· at 11:00· Room 0.96-0.97 (Level 0)·
summary
BBC reveals concrete results and problems: a TV framework tal collapses 14 platform codebases into one, iPlayer serves ~25M users and Sounds ~5M, and one random Node repo pulls in 339 dependencies with 18 internal authors and ~335 external collaborators so each internal dev effectively relies on ~400 outside developers. Tools built include a repo risk tracker via GitHub webhooks, dependabot, project-viability/chaos metrics and a monorepo mirroring plan using Copybara. Public-funding rules force market-impact checks and IP/legal signoff, and contribution turnaround drops from months toward weeks.
AI-written summary · about
chapters (15)
- 0:00BBC’s open source journey
- 4:40BBC’s open source history
- 9:56Open source community challenges
- 13:48Scaling open source projects
- 21:16Virtual open source office
- 24:10Balancing strategy and business
- 30:28Secure open source practices
- 34:21Tools for open source decisions
- 36:11Measuring project health
- 38:58Future open source plans
- 40:01Q&A on broadcaster collaboration
- 41:27Balancing quality and quantity
- 43:38Managing open source contributions
- 44:42BBC content and APIs
- 45:51Feedback for standards
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