Buy a product and use it widely. If necessary, write an (open) API around it yourself that others can connect to and you’re done.NB If they are going to use their existing software and just need to make some adjustments to make it work together, then that’s fine of course. Then the costs are manageable.
That, as far as I understand, is exactly the intention. They already have existing working systems. They don’t want to get rid of that, but they do want to be able to work together. This is often self-developed software and there is probably nothing on the market that matches what they already have.
Don’t underestimate how crazy big the ARD is, it is a few sizes bigger than the NPO. The ARD has more than 20,000 and is the largest public broadcaster worldwide. The ZDF is also huge. Together they have unique needs, a lot of money and probably also a lot of unique software.
It sometimes seems to these government services that open source has become the goal itself. That is of course very nice, but I always see open source more as a (good) means and not as an end.
I see it more and more as a ‘condition’. It should indeed not be a goal in itself, but if there are no other ways to achieve that goal then the difference is not unimportant, and in practice it often comes down to that.
Without knowing the motivations of the ARD & ZDF, I can of course only speculate, but just like the Dutch NOS, ARD & ZDF are umbrella organizations that collaborate with smaller organizations that provide the programs. I don’t know much about it, but I assume that new broadcasters or producers are regularly added and they will all have to work together. Then it is easy if they can all use the same software.
That brings me to a fairly unique feature of the GPL that could be important here.
It is a way to work together on software for parties that distrust each other.
GPL has a friendly hippie image of freedom & happiness, but there is also a hard business aspect to it. Namely the obligation to share your code with all users, including your own adjustments. This is great for organizations that are afraid that a competitor will make off with their beautiful code and then push them out of the market with a small (unetic?) adjustment with their own product, or secretly build something into the joint product that will bother the rest. has, now or in the future. That may sound a bit paranoid, but that’s the way business contracts are, they always take the worst-case scenario into account.
Because ARD & ZDF work together with each other and countless other broadcasters, I can imagine that there is some mutual distrust between more politically motivated broadcasters. In the Netherlands I do not see Ongehoord Nederland and Omroep Zwart working together in good faith. If that is necessary, they will want guarantees that they cannot unilaterally benefit from each other’s work without sharing themselves, and that they cannot hinder each other with unwanted features or make the other person pay for them.
You can see that it works in the Linux kernel, where Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Amazon, countless other companies and volunteers from the community collaborate. On every other level they fight each other out, they don’t trust each other at all. Yet they manage to work together in a way I haven’t seen with other licenses. BSD/MIT/Apache-like licenses go a long way, but that is mainly based on mutual trust and voluntariness. This usually works fine, but it is not good enough for large companies, which want certainty about what will happen if trust disappears. GPL can offer that and most other licenses cannot.
That is a bit of a side street, but could be important in such a partnership between broadcasters with diverse (including political) views.
