According to a recent report on the perceptions of open source at the Swedish national broadcasting company SVT, the organisation’s responsibility to the public goes hand in hand with a wider adoption of open source (OS) solutions. According to SVT, open source is “not only a matter of technology, but just as much a matter of transparency and public service.”
The paper, prepared by Frida Hjelm, the OSPO lead at SVT, highlights the organisational attitudes and challenges of adopting OS solutions in the public sector. In a series of interviews with developers, managers and platform developers working at SVT, the author presents the difficulties of contributing to OS projects at SVT. SVT strongly depends on open source software, with the organisation’s GitHub containing 28 original repositories.
Open source in action at SVT
The idea for the report came from a “wish and an ambition to get an updated, well-anchored view of the state of open source at SVT.” The SVT OSPO started as “more of an employee initiative and as a part-time, voluntary activity,” with the current usage of open source products being varied in both quantity and character. SVT’s CasparCG Server (GitHub) in particular was known among the employees as a major OS project stemming from the organisation. This server software can run on both Windows and Linux and can display professional graphics, audio and video to multiple outputs. It has been in 24/7 broadcast production since 2006, and is currently maintained by a separate organisation, boasting over 3.8k commits on GitHub.
Employees’ attitudes and challenges of OS
The study investigated attitudes and knowledge of the open source domain among 16 interviewees who were employed in development at SVT but not directly engaged in open source projects. As shown in the paper, the developers at SVT are well aware of the fact that they use many open source components, but are still unclear about the licence terms or which components are OS-based. When asked about which challenges they think stand in the way of bigger adoption of OS by SVT, the interviewees mentioned concerns around information security – the risk of accidentally leaking internal information to unauthorised actors – as well as the unintended disclosure of vulnerabilities in public-facing products. Hjelm identifies these issues as emblematic of the “security by obscurity” paradigm – the belief that just because vulnerabilities and other flaws in software are not known, they do not pose a risk.
The interviews also reveal a more nuanced concern around open source that reflects the SVT’s role as the national public television broadcaster. The developers worry that due to SVT’s public role, the open source projects developed within and for SVT would face increased public scrutiny and criticism. They fear an external party finding their code to be inadequate, or of other media companies perceiving the in-house open source development as an unfair advantage disturbing the market. Many of the interviewees noted that they work on OS projects in their free time, and that this sometimes includes projects that would later be useful and beneficial to their paid work at SVT.
Adoption of open source seen as beneficial
The employees show a positive attitude towards the use of open source at SVT. The developers point to low costs, wide availability, and a large user base with accompanying large amounts of documentation making them favour open source components over proprietary alternatives. Similarly, the managers emphasise accessibility and low cost as the determining factors, and consider them as an enabler for development teams to operate more freely. The study identifies platform developers as having the most detailed, nuanced grasp of their own OS usage. They agree with the availability and cost arguments, while also emphasising the actual access to the source code as one of the main reasons for choosing to work with open source solutions.
In order to address the perceived difficulty of in-house contribution and maintenance of OS projects, the employees suggest hiring an internal DX (Developer Experience) or OSX (Open Source Experience) team to mediate the development process. They also point out that the public role and public financing of the organisation should motivate SVT’s greater involvement in contributing to the public good in the form of both code and other open materials. The study highlights the fact that organisations have a lot to gain from participating in and engaging with the open source community.
For more information about the state of open source in Sweden, have a look at our updated Country report.