linux.conf.au: The Beeb and the penguin

By Sam Varghese
Sunday, 27 January 2008 03:10

Opinion and Analysis

The BBC and Linux - when you see the two words juxtaposed together, one tends to be surprised. Simply because all the recent coverage of the Beeb has been about the iPlayer fiasco - how the biggest public broadcaster came out with a player that could cater to just one platform.
But on digging a bit one finds out that there's two BBC people who will be presenting papers at Australia's national linux conference - and, what's more, the BBC turns out to have some kind of open source pedigree .

Stuart Cunningham, a soft-spoken senior software engineer, will be speaking about tapeless television production, while his wife, Anuradha Suraparaju, will present a paper on the Dirac video compression system.

Their appearance marks the first time that BBC staff have attended any of the three major Linux conferences, though, according to Cunningham, "(we) have attended several (open source) ones in Europe, the UK and a couple in the US. One of my colleagues, Michael Sparks, has done a number of presentations at various European conferences such as the European Python conferences. He's particularly interested in Python... And there was a FSMSI - free media and software - I can't remember the acronym; that was in Paris. And we had a couple of people go to that one, looking at free software for video and audio. There was another one in Europe done by the EBU - that's the European Broadcasting Union. That was where my boss, David Kirby, attended, and did a talk on the area that we're working in."

Cunningham grew up in Melbourne and is a Monash University graduate. "In fact, I used Linux for the first time in 1991. That was during the first year of the Computer Science course - we did assembly programming and they had labs full of 386 PCs running a very, very early version of Linux, something like 0.1. And we were using the GNU assembler and gcc for the programming. So I've been using Linux pretty well ever since 1991," he says.

After working in Melbourne for a few years, he happened to read that the BBC was testing out the the free software codec, ogg-vorbis. "...in 2002, I read about the BBC doing streams of ogg vorbis, or trials of ogg vorbis And so that got me very interested in the BBC. I knew it was a publicly funded organisation, and I thought that was a fantastic idea - a publicly funded organisation exploring free codecs for audio," he says.

"So I applied for a job position. I left my job in Melbourne and went over there, stayed with a friend for a few weeks, and then had the interview in London, and got the job. And so, since 2002, to the end of last year, I've worked in London for the BBC."